Lawyers say free hunger striker now, after state offers November release

State prosecutors on Wednesday offered to refrain from extending the detention of Palestinian prisoner Mohammed Allaan past his November release date if he ends his 64-day hunger strike immediately, the detainee’s lawyers said.

The lawyers called instead for his immediate release on account of his failing health.

The offer came as Allaan’s brother said the hospitalized detainee would ask doctors to end medical treatment that’s keeping him alive, after a protest fast that has lasted 64 days.

Qadoura Fares, head of the Palestinian Prisoners Club, told The Times of Israel on Wednesday that a sharp deterioration in Allaan’s condition requires his immediate release from jail, rebuffing a reported Israeli proposal to refrain from extending his administrative detention come November.

“He’s stopped communicating with his surroundings,” Fares told The Times of Israel. “He just stares. It seems like his brain function has deteriorated.”

Fares said that the gradual change in Israel’s position on Allaan — offering on Monday to deport him for four years and today to release him in November — is significant.

Allaan’s lawyers, he added, will decide whether to accept the state’s proposal based on a medical report currently being prepared by Allaan’s doctors.

An earlier report from Palestinian news agency Ma’an indicated that Allaan’s legal team had accepted the offer.

Allaan, 31, is protesting his incarceration under administrative detention — an Israeli legal term for imprisonment without trial on terrorism charges — for alleged affiliation with the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization.

The High Court hearing is the second after an earlier appeal was heard Monday due to his deteriorating medical condition, and a decision was postponed.

Previously the state offered to release Allaan on condition that he leave the country for four years; Allaan’s attorneys demanded that he be released before September 22, the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. If they accept the new conditions, he’d be freed November 3.

Allaan’s brother Ameed told Army Radio that Mohammed intends to continue striking and will ask doctors to stop treating him.

“‘I’ll continue — either I’ll die or I’ll return home,'” Allaan’s brother told Army Radio the prisoner said to him.

“I don’t believe I saw a human being. it’s not a human being, it’s what’s left of a human being. He doesn’t hear, he doesn’t see,” Ameed Allaan said.

Allaan’s mother, meanwhile, told the Maariv daily that Israeli authorities have prevented her from seeing her son in Ashkelon’s Barzilai Medical Center.

“Now they’ve let his brother Ameed to visit Mohammed. They didn’t let me enter,” Maazouze Allaan said. “In the name of what law in the world do they prevent a mother from visiting her son? They don’t let me enter because I stand by his side in his just struggle.”

Allaan “declared in front of his doctors that if there is not any solution to his case within 24 hours he will ask for all treatment to stop and will stop drinking water,” the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club said in a statement Tuesday.

Allaan was awakened from a medically induced coma as his condition stabilized after he was given water and salts intravenously, doctors said Tuesday. He had also been connected to a respirator and doctors said over the weekend that he was in critical condition and near death.

A lawyer by profession, Allaan has been on hunger strike since June 18, taking only water. He lost consciousness Friday morning in the hospital.

Following an appeal for Allaan’s release on medical grounds, the High Court found Monday that “there is no change in the justification for holding [Allaan] in administrative detention,” and said it would reconvene Wednesday for a further hearing on his possible release.

At a High Court hearing Monday, one of the doctors treating Allaan said that if he were to continue his hunger strike he was likely to go into a fatal decline.

Palestinian groups have warned of a violent backlash should Allaan die while in Israeli detention.

The Justice Ministry released a statement ahead of Monday’s hearing that included an offer to free Allaan “if he agrees to go abroad for a period of four years.” His lawyer immediately dismissed the proposal.

Several demonstrations in support of Allaan have been held since his condition began to deteriorate over the past two weeks, with pro-Palestinian protesters facing off against right-wing Israeli counter-protesters and Israeli police in sometimes violent confrontations.

Israel passed a controversial law last month allowing authorities to force-feed hunger-striking prisoners, but doctors at Barzilai and elsewhere have said they will refuse to comply with the directive.

Several Palestinians have gone on hunger strike in recent years to protest administrative detention, with a number managing to wrest their freedom or better conditions from Israeli authorities.