RAMALLAH, August 24, 2016 (WAFA) – Israeli authorities have issued administrative detention orders against 66 Palestinian detainees, placing them in jail without a charge or trial, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS).

PPC stated that 22 detainees received administrative detention orders for the first time, while the remaining 44 others received renewed administrative orders.

Among the detianees were journalists Ali Ewewi, Omar Nazzal, and Nedal Abu Aker, PPC added.

Administrative detention is the imprisonment of Palestinians without charge or trial and on the basis of secret evidence for up to six month periods, indefinitely renewable by Israeli military courts.

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.

M.N