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Palestinians jailed in Israel launch hunger strike

17 April 2012 18:25 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Thousands of Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons declared a 24-hour hunger strike on Tuesday afternoon, demanding an end to administrative detention and solitary confinement, APA reports quoting news.xinhuanet.com website.

Most of the 2,300 prisoners who returned their meals to prison guards are affiliated with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militant factions in Gaza and the West Bank, and are serving sentences for security-related offenses. Some 1,200 contemplated an open-ended hunger strike earlier in the week, but eventually reneged.

The prisoners are also protesting a decision by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in June last year to revoke some of their privileges - including academic studies, access to newspapers and visits by families from Gaza - in response to Hamas ’ refusal to allow Red Cross representatives to visit Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive in Gaza at the time who has been released later.

While Shalit was freed in a landmark deal between Israel and Hamas in December in exchange for 1,077 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom were serving multiple life sentences for carrying out lethal attacks against Israeli civilians, the privileges have since not been reinstated, fuelling inmates who were not included in the deal to embark on several similar hunger strikes in recent months.

Issa Qaraqi, minister of prisoner affairs in the Palestinian National Authority, warned at a press conference in Ramallah last week that the situation in Israeli jails has become "very dangerous."

"The Israeli government is using the prisoners as a tool to retaliate against the Palestinian people and their leadership," he said.

A spokeswoman for the Israel Prison Service was not immediately available for comment. Earlier in the day, a source from the organization told The Jerusalem Post that its physicians were put on standby to treat the striking inmates.