RAMALLAH, October 22, 2017 (WAFA) – A Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails has been on an open-ended hunger strike for 12 consecutive days to protest his administrative detention without charge or trial, Sunday said the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS).

The detainee, who was identified as 19-year-old Hasan Shokeh, is only consuming water and refuses to take nourishments or to undergo any medical checkups.

A PPS lawyer stated after visiting the detainee in Ofer Israeli prison that the Israeli prison administration placed Shokeh, who suffers from Asthma, under solitary confinement immediately after he declared his strike.

According to the lawyer, the detainee’s health condition has begun to deteriorate after 12 days of hunger strike. The detainee currently suffers from persistent headaches and dry eyes.

Shokeh has spent around 12 years in Israeli jails, eight of which were under administrative detention. He was re-detained on august 28, 2017; only one month after he was released from Israeli prisons from a prior arrest, and sentenced to detention without charge or trial for a period of six months.

The use of administrative detention dates from the “emergency laws” of the British colonial era in Palestine, said the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.

It stated, “Israel’s use of administrative detention violates international law; such detention is allowed only in individual circumstances that are exceptionally compelling for “imperative reasons of security.”

Israel uses administrative detention routinely as a form of collective punishment and mass detention of Palestinians, and frequently uses administrative detention when it fails to obtain confessions in interrogations of Palestinian detainees.

Palestinian detainees have continuously resorted to open-ended hunger strikes as a way to protest their illegal administrative detention and to demand an end to this policy, which violates international law.

T.R.