Jader Adnan, a well-known 44-year-old Palestinian prisoner, died early yesterday in an Israeli prison after his health deteriorated over an 86-day hunger strike to protest his detention by Israel . His death fueled protests in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, from where 22 rockets were fired into Israeli territory. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (YIP), of which Adnan was a member, threatened Israel with retaliation. It is the first death due to a hunger strike in Israel in more than three decades.
Adnan began the protest on February 5, the same day he was arrested on charges of terrorism and incitement to violence as a member of the YIP, an organization considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the US and the EU. The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) held Israel “fully responsible” for Adnan’s death and promised to take this “crime” to the International Criminal Court in the face of the authorities’ refusal to release him despite the risk of death.
The organization Physicians for Human Rights in Israel (PHRI) warned on Monday, as the strike reached its 86th day, that Adnan faced “imminent death” and had to be “urgently transferred to a hospital for medical observationâ€, as he was “dangerously emaciated†and had “difficulty moving or holding a basic conversationâ€. The Israel Prison Service argued that hospitalization had not been an option, as Adnan had refused “even a preliminary inspection” at the facility. The Palestinian expressed his desire to be hospitalized and presented three conditions for undergoing medical examinations in prison: allowing his family to visit him, being closely accompanied by a PHRI doctor and that his medical information not be shared with Israeli authorities, which did not happen. In addition, an Israeli district court recently rejected two requests to require him to be transferred to a hospital.
Adnan was arrested in his residence in the Palestinian village of Arrabeh, in the Jenin area, one of the most turbulent areas of the occupied West Bank in the last year and where the Islamic Jihad has a presence. Arrested in the past twelve times by Israel, Adnan had spent more than eight years in prison and has become a symbol of struggle for the rest of the Palestinian prisoners through the five hunger strikes he held in protest of the so-called “arrests administrative”, that is, arrests without charge or trial, which is practiced by Israel. The method has been used by other Palestinian prisoners, sometimes en masse, but none have died since 1992.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad warned that Israel “will pay the price” for Adnan’s “murderous crime,” in the words of Mohamed al-Hindi, a member of YIP’s political committee in the Gaza Strip. The warning coincided with the launch yesterday of 22 rockets from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, which caused an injury in Sderot. At the same time, hundreds of people, including many teenagers and families with children, took to the streets of the occupied West Bank and Gaza to demonstrate in support of Adnan and mourn his death. There were a few clashes with Israeli law enforcement.
The YIP has a limited presence in the West Bank, but is the second most powerful armed group in Gaza, ruled by the Islamist movement Hamas, where Israeli forces waged a brief war against it in August. For its part, Hamas also denounced that Adnan’s death was “a premeditated and cold-blooded murder” by Israel, which refused to release him despite the deterioration of his health.
Currently, almost 5,000 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, of which more than 1,000 are in administrative detention. More than one million Palestinians have been imprisoned since the beginning of the Israeli occupation, in 1967, including more than 15,000 women, according to information from the Ministry for Detainees of the Palestinian National Authority, which states that “ every Palestinian family has witnessed the arrest of at least one of its membersâ€.
