RAMALLAH, July 8, 2015 (WAFA) – Israeli authorities have placed a hunger striking Palestinian prisoner in solitary confinement, Thursday reported the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club (PPC).

PPC, a local organization concerned with the affairs of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, said 24-year-old Udai Steiti from Jenin refugee camp has been on hunger strike for 22 days over his administrative detention, and was recently locked down in a solitary cell.

Under administrative detention, prisoners are held without charge or trial and for indefinite and renewable period of time.

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.

The use of administrative detention dates from the “emergency laws” of the British colonial era in Palestine. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, “Israel's use of administrative detention blatantly violates the restrictions of international law. Israel carries it out in a highly classified manner that denies detainees the possibility of mounting a proper defense. Moreover, the detention has no upper time limit.”

“Over the years, Israel has placed thousands of Palestinians in administrative detention for prolonged periods of time, without trying them, without informing them of the charges against them, and without allowing them or their counsel to examine the evidence,” B’Tselem reports.

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/M.H