UN-Truth

Today is Day 66 of Khader Adnan’s continuous hunger strike against Israeli Administrative Detention, and Israel’s Supreme Court is scheduled to hear his petition against it.

According to a report by Isabelle Kersh for the New York Times, published here, Adnan’s lawyer Attorney Jawad Bulous says “We are asking for him to be released on grounds that they have nothing against him”.

Administrative Detention orders are handed down by the Israeli military justice system in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, against Palestinians who are then transferred to Israeli jails inside Israel proper for terms which are handed down for periods of up to six months, renewable.

Transferring Palestinians out of the occupied territory into Israel is considered a violation of international law, but Israel feels justified in doing this because it does not consider the West Bank occupied. [However, neither has Israel ever annexed most of the West Bank either. Israel did, however, extend it's administration to East Jerusalem and about 65 square kilometers around it, after it's military conquest in late June 1967, and unilaterally created a new area which Israel calls the "Greater Jerusalem Municipality".]

The Israeli Supreme Court has authorized the transfer of Palestinian prisoners out of the West Bank into Israel proper.

This afternoon, the Israeli Supreme Court will hear Khader Adnan’s appeal against Administrative Detention — in which no evidence is presented to the accused or his/her lawyers, so no defense is possible.

Only the generic charge of “being a threat to the peace and security of the region” is made public.

Whatever evidence there may be, and such as it is, often obtained through interrogation measures that amount to torture, is communicated privately in a closed meeting between the Israeli Secret Services, known as GSS or Shabak, and the Israeli military court judge.

There are now some 310 Palestinian Administrative Detainees sitting in Israeli jails — up from about 200 a year ago. Many of these are somehow linked or affiliated with Islamist Palestinian organizations that are opposed to the current Palestinian leadership and even to the Palestinian Authority that was created by agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] under the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s.

The NYTimes article on the case quotes Shawan Jabarin, the director of Al Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization based in the West Bank city of Ramallah, as saying that some 11,000 Palestinians were under administrative detention during the First Intifada in the late 1980s.

According to the NYTimes, “Mr. Jabarin himself has spent a total of seven years in administrative detention, including a two-year stint in the late 1990s. ‘In Arabic, we have a term for it’, said Shawan Jabarin, the director of Al Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. ‘It is like reburying a corpse again and again’.”

Administrative Detention is, in a way, a kind of death — or a kind of miserable suspended life.

Khader Adnan’s hunger strike, which has now entered its most critical phase, dramatizes this situation on the world stage now.

Filed under: Human Rights, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians