Dozens of Palestinians held without charge or trial by Israel ended their 63-day-long hunger strike protest yesterday — marking the longest hunger strike in the history of the Palestinian prisoners movement.
Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups stated today that approximately eighty of the hunger strikers are still hospitalized and shackled to their beds.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government is set to push through legislation which would permit the force-feeding of hunger strikers, a threat wielded by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an attempt to break the two-month strike.
United Nations experts yesterday called on Israel to abandon the draft law, describing the plan to break the hunger strike as “cruel and inhuman” treatment.
Gavan Kelly of the Palestinian human rights and prisoner advocacy group Addameer told The Electronic Intifada last week that the force feeding tactic amounted to “torture … on an industrial scale.”
Kelly added that “since the second half of 2011, not one day has passed where there hasn’t been at least one Palestinian on hunger strike. And the Israelis have failed to deal with the hunger strikes … we consider that their way to deal with the hunger strikes is through introducing force-feeding.”
In a short video published yesterday, Hassan Jabareen, the founder and general director of the Palestinian human rights group Adalah, explains the goal of the mass hunger strike and Israel’s motivation to break it: more
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