Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan, who was affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, has died in an Israeli prison after almost three months on a hunger strike.
Adnan who began his hunger strike shortly after being arrested on February 5, “refused to undergo medical tests and receive medical treatment” and “was found unconscious in his cell” in the early morning on Tuesday, Israeli prison officials said.
Adnan, 44, from the town of Arraba near Jenin city in the occupied West Bank, had refused to eat for 87 days to protest against his detention without charge, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.
On several occasions after his past arrests, he resorted to hunger strikes, one of which lasted 55 days in 2015, as a form of protest against his detention under what is known as administrative detention. This type of detention allows Palestinians to be held by Israel without any charges or trial for an indefinite period of time. Israel is currently holding more than 1,000 Palestinian detainees without charge or trial, the highest number since 2003.
“Khader Adnan has been executed in cold blood,” the WAED Prisoners Association in Gaza told the Reuters news agency.
Adnan, a father of nine, was arrested 12 times during his life.
“This is a very dangerous thing that has happened,” said Mustafa Barghouti, the former Palestinian information minister and general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative political party.
“I call it an act of assassination because the Israeli government knew very well, and its military courts, that a person who is on hunger strike for 87 days, who had not received any kind of medical care, could die at any moment. And that’s exactly what has happened,” Barghouti said.
