I’d been expecting that Palestinian hunger striker Khader Adnan would not be alive by the time you read this. Adnan, a 33-year-old baker and father of two daughters living in the occupied West Bank, and a political activist and spokesman for Islamic Jihad, was on hunger strike against the Israeli practice of ‘administrative detention’.
His 66-day strike was the longest in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Adnan was hospitalised and lay shackled to his hospital bed, despite the Israeli authorities’ commitment to unshackle him. However, as I sat down to write this, Adnan agreed to end his hunger strike in return for the state of Israel releasing him on 17 April.
Administrative detention is imprisonment without charge or trial, authorised by administrative order rather than judicial decree. Inherited from the pre-1948 British Mandate emergency regulations, administrative detention is deemed illegal by international law, which says it can be used only in the most exceptional cases, as the last means available for preventing danger that cannot be thwarted by less harmful means. Israel has extended the use of administrative detention since it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, enabling the state to hold prisoners indefinitely without charging them or bringing them to trial.
Khader Adnan’s story is emblematic of many other detainees. Like them, he was taken from his home in a night raid; he claims he was beaten and humiliated by Israeli soldiers and began his hunger strike in protest. Evidence and allegations against Adnan were not made available to him or his lawyers; the only allegation made was that he is a ‘high risk’ to Israeli security.
According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, there are currently 307 administrative detainees not charged with any crime. During the second Intifada, the number of detainees rose to the thousands, including children – some of whom are held in solitary confinement without access to their parents or lawyers for several weeks.
According to Israeli blogger Joseph Dana, despite criticism of administrative detention by the USA in facilities such as Guantanamo Bay, such criticism has only recently surfaced in Israeli society, even though Adnan’s hunger strike raised widespread protest from international Palestine solidarity campaigns and local Palestinian and Israeli activists.
Like others, I was happy to hear of the end of Adnan’s hunger strike and hope it has not damaged his body beyond repair. His release is a definite victory of the Palestine solidarity movement. However, I agree with Amnesty International that the deal made with Adnan is insufficient, and that he can no longer constitute a danger to Israel’s security.
“A deal which will see Khader Adnan released on 17 April unless significant new evidence emerges is insufficient when he needs urgent medical treatment to save his life now,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty’s interim director for the Middle East and north Africa.
I fully endorse Amnesty’s call for Israel to end the practice of administrative detention now, because it violates the internationally recognised right to a fair trial that must be upheld for all detainees, even during states of emergency.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann.
