[News] Palestinian prisoner hunger strike continues, despite Israeli repression

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http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3037.shtml

Human Rights
Palestinian prisoner hunger strike continues, despite Israeli repression
Arjan El Fassed, The Electronic Intifada, 26 August 2004

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Over 2,000 Palestinian political prisoners are currently participating in a 
hunger strike to protest their detention conditions and treatment by 
Israeli prison authorities. These include demands for public phones, the 
removal of partitions that separate inmates from visiting family members, 
and a halt to strip searches. They are also demanding the right to be able 
to hold their children during visits.

The protest is a non-political action aimed at securing conditions 
consistent with basic standards of humanity for Palestinian prisoners. 
Since the beginning of the current Intifada Israeli prison authorities have 
implemented a number of policies that violate basic standards for the 
treatment of prisoners.

Israeli prison authorities have resorted to new measures to end the open 
hunger strike that entered its 11th day today. Lawyers of the Palestinian 
Prisoners Society reported, after calling on a number of strikers in 
Hadarim, Bir Sheva, and Eilon prisons, that Israeli authorities were 
deliberately creating confusion among prisoners through constant movement 
of a big number of inmates from one ward to another and from prison to another.

In Nafha prison, prisoners are moved around from one cell to another every 
couple of days. In the same prison, an Israeli special unit called "Nahson" 
raids prison cells on a daily basis in order to increase psychological 
pressure on the prisoners.

As a new kind of punitive measure, Israeli authorities have confiscated 
family photos of prisoners and introduced criminal convicts into the wards 
of the prisoners on hunger strike, the lawyers reported.

They also refused to extend any medical assistance to needy prisoners 
unless they ate first, the lawyers said, adding that there were reports 
that prison authorities forcibly stripped captives, threw their clothes 
away, then compelled prisoners to run naked after their clothes. Prisoners 
in Ayalon prison have said that an Israeli high ranking officer visited 
their ward and stated that the "war waged on Palestinian prisoners is part 
and parcel of the war waged on the Palestinian people".

Prisoners reported the use of coercive measures by Israeli authorities 
against hunger strikers, including threats, and psychological and physical 
pressures such as beatings. Israeli guards often raid prison cells and 
force prisoners to strip naked. Israeli guards have confiscated salt, 
cigarettes, books, and stationary, as well as fans, which has caused 
breathing difficulties in the stuffy cells, especially among those in 
solitary confinement.

Prisoners have been refused medical aid. Israeli authorities refuse to 
transfer any prisoners to hospitals outside the prison walls. Ibrahim Njas 
from Ramallah who is being held in solitary confinement at Ramle prison was 
denied medical aid. Israeli prison guards refused to tranfer him even to a 
clinic inside the prison. Some medical staff at Israeli prisons have tried 
to blackmail Palestinian prisoners by offering medical aid and medication 
on the condition that they break their hunger strike.

The Palestinian Prisoners Society has addressed an urgent appeal to the 
World Health Organization to immediately intervene and investigate the 
cruel treatment of those prisoners at the hands of Israeli medical staff. 
The statement charged the doctors of conspiring with the prison authorities 
to break the strike, through bargaining with the sick prisoner to end their 
strike in return for supplying them with medication.

Israeli authorities transferred leaders of the prisoners' movement to other 
prisons or placed them in solitary confinement. Tawfiq Abu Naim, the 
prisoners' representative of Nafha prison was transferred to the solitary 
confinement section of Bir As-Sabaa detention center and Naser Abu Rajab 
was moved from Shattah to Gilbo. Seventy prisoners were transferred from 
Asqalan prison to Nafha.

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