Palestinian prisoners to hold solidarity hunger strike
On Thursday’s Nakba Day, inmates to demonstrate support for administrative detainees demanding trial or release
Security prisoners in Israeli jails announced Wednesday that they intended to hold a one-day hunger strike Thursday to show solidarity with a group of 125 administrative detainees who have been refusing food in recent weeks in protest against being jailed without trial.
Eighty-five detainees began their open-ended hunger strike on April 24, and others joined afterward. The strike is now entering its third week, and will continue until they are put on trial or released, the detainees said.
The date chosen by the prisoners for the one-day hunger strike coincides with Nakba Day, on which the Palestinians mourn the creation of the Israeli state and the displacement that preceded and followed it.
The issue of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, as well as the hunger strikes they have embarked on throughout the year, is expected to feature prominently in Nakba Day protests throughout Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners staged a one-day hunger strike last Thursday as well, also in solidarity with others who had been fasting for two weeks in protest at being imprisoned without trial.
“About 90 have been refusing food for two weeks,” Israel Prison Service spokeswoman Sivan Weizman told AFP last week. “Today, several hundred more joined them but just for one day,” she said.
About 5,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons, nearly 200 of them under administrative detention orders which allow suspects to be imprisoned without trial for up to six months.
