Israeli Court Approves Well Destruction In Bethlehem

An Israeli military court approved, Tuesday, an order issued by the Israeli military demanding a Palestinian farmer from Al-Khader town, near Bethlehem, to demolish an irrigation well under the pretext that it is “close to the Annexation Wall”.

Ahmad Salah, coordinator of the National Committee Against the Wall and Settlements in Al-Khader, stated that the Beit El military court, near the central West Bank city of Ramallah, rejected an appeal filed by the well’s owner, Mahmoud Sbeih.

The well was dug by the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee, and was financed by Holland as part of a project to support Palestinian farmers in the area.

The Israeli court granted Sbeih two weeks to demolish his well; otherwise, the army will demolish it and send the hyped bill to the farmer.

Israel’s illegal Annexation Wall was built in a manner that allows easy settlement construction and expansion at the expense of privately-owned Palestinian lands and orchards.

In July 2004, 14 of the 15 Hague judges of the International Court ruled that the construction of the Annexation Wall in the West Bank violated international law and "constituted illegal annexation."

The court said Israel should stop the construction immediately, dismantle existing sections and compensate Palestinians harmed by its construction.

Israel ignored the ruling, considered it “irrelevant”, and went on to issue a 170-page response to the ruling protesting it, and claiming that “the court was looking at the wrong, outdated route”.

The Annexation Wall extends on more than 810 kilometers leading to the illegal annexation of thousands of Dunams of Palestinian lands, and isolates thousands of Dunams. More

To destroy wells in the water stressed occupied Palestine is unforgivable, specially given that much of the Jordan river and the aquifer under the country is stolen by the occupying power. Editor

Gaza lives on

Since 2007, most of the approximately 1.5 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip have suffered gravely from an intensified land, air and sea blockade imposed by Israel.

The blockade, deemed illegal by the United Nations, was implemented after Hamas, a Palestinian faction labelled a terrorist organisation by Tel Aviv, took control over the territory and ousted Fatah officials from power in the battle of Gaza.

After more than two decades of tight sanctions and even though Israel eased the restrictions on non-military goods in 2010, the blockade continues to take a heavy toll on Gaza's civilian population, with many essential and basic goods banned from being exported or imported. This has led to rampant poverty and a massive unemployment rate in Gaza.

But Gaza once had thriving economy and was a major exporter of key staple foods, including fruits and vegetables, to countries across the world. Israel's policies since the occupation, however, have forced the vast majority of Gazans to rely on foreign humanitarian aid for survival.

According to the UN, about one-third of Gaza's arable land and 85 per cent of its fishing waters are totally or partially inaccessible due to the Israeli blockade.

Abu Anwar Jahjouh, who has worked as a corn seller for the past 15 years and lives in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, says it is a daily struggle to scrape out a living: "Back in the 1960s, we used to export oranges. Ships would come from Turkey, Spain, Germany and all of Europe. We used to export oranges, lemons, clementines and grapefruits. But those ships stopped coming to Gaza after 1967. No one comes to Gaza anymore. We can't export anything. That's why we started selling corn here on the beach. We sell anything." More

 

Welcome to Nazareth

Until a few years ago, the only road northwards from central Israel to Nazareth rose from the fertile fields of the Jezreel Valley to wend its way steeply up the craggy face of a hill in the Lower Galilee range, following what must have once been a goat-herders’ path.

The crawl upwards—often behind a tourist coach or a truck—provided plenty of time to admire a dramatic outcrop of rock known as Mount Precipice, the spot where, according to Christian tradition, the townsfolk of ancient Nazareth tried to hurl a young Jesus to his death after he proclaimed himself the son of God. Locals refer to the place in Arabic as “Jebel Kufze," or “Jumping Hill,” alluding to what was possibly Jesus’ first miracle. He is said to have leapt to safety as he was pushed over the precipice.

For millenia, Jebel Kufze hid a secret. At its foot, close to where Jesus might have been dashed on the rocks had he not “jumped,” a cave was discovered by Franciscan monks in the 1960s. Excavations over the next decade identified human remains dating back possibly 100,000 years. At the time, so-called Kufze Man was our oldest ancestor ever unearthed.

But even Jebel Kufze, so rich in human and sacred significance, had no defense against the needs of a modern state, especially one whose officials have little or no sympathy with Christianity. Shortly after I moved to Nazareth in 2001, bulldozers and diggers moved in to tear out the lower southern flank of Mount Precipice, the deep scar eventually stopping just short of the Kufze Cave. A bridge on stilts was built up from the Jezreel Valley’s floor to what was left of the mount’s lower slope, and there engineers blasted a hole through the rock to create a tunnel.

The old “goat road” became a little-used scenic route to Nazareth. Meanwhile, the bridge and tunnel, which opened in 2008, needed a name. The list of candidates should have been long. It could have made reference to humankind’s forebears interred nearby; or to the miracle that averted the untimely death of a man in whose name a global religion was founded; or any of the subsequent Nazarenes who made a more limited mark on their city and the Galilee, such as Tawfik Ziyad, a mayor in the 1970s and 1980s whose “poetry of protest” still inspires Palestinians. But none were chosen.

Instead, government officials held discussions behind closed doors. The first we in Nazareth knew was when a sign appeared a short distance before the tunnel, naming the new route the “Rafael Eitan Bridge," after a famous general. Nazarenes were not consulted for good reason; their vehement opposition was assured.

The tenuous justification for the road’s name was that Eitan had been born in the Jezreel Valley, in a kibbutz (farming cooperative) called Tel Adashim. But Eitan’s fame derived not from his connection to the Lower Galilee or Nazareth, today the largest Arab city in Israel and the effective capital of the 1.4 million Palestinians who have citizenship inside the state.

He made his name first as a hawkish military chief of staff and then as a politician who was always ready to voice his visceral hatred of Palestinians and Arabs. In the early 1980s, he established a far-right party, Tzomet—an ideological forerunner of current foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party—and enthusiastically advocated settlement building. He is best known for stating: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”

Outside observers have assumed that Eitan was offering a policy prescription for the occupied territories. However, Palestinians inside Israel, much better and longer acquainted with Zionist politics, understood this declaration to refer to Palestinians wherever they were found, including in the Galilee. On another occasion, Eitan outlined his party’s platform: “We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel. …Force is all they do, or ever will, understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.”

There could have hardly been a more succinct exposition of the logic of a central plank of Zionist policy known as “Judaization.” Long before Israel began building settlements in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, its strategic planners were devising similar methods to contain, fragment and control the dozens of Palestinian communities whose inhabitants had not been chased out of the new state in 1948. The goal was to turn these towns and villages into figurative “bottles” and transform their Palestinian inhabitants—a fifth of the population—into “drugged cockroaches,” who would docilely accept their inferior status in a self-proclaimed Jewish state.

Judaizing Nazareth

One of the very first targets for Judaization was Nazareth. The city, unlike most other Palestinian communities, had emerged relatively unscathed from the year-long bloodshed of the 1948 war. The newly declared state of Israel, still awaiting recognition from the United Nations, worried about a potential backlash from the international community, and especially the Vatican, if Nazareth were seriously attacked. So the city was left largely in peace as Israel’s armed forces swept northwards towards the Lebanese and Syrian borders. More

 

Richard Falk: Israel’s Pattern of Abuse is Inhumane, Cruel, Degrading and Unlawful

United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, Richard Falk, condemned Israel’s use of solitary confinement against Palestinian children, as reported earlier by the UN Special Committee on Israeli practices in the Occupied Territories.

He urged the Israeli Government to treat Palestinian children detainees in accordance with international human rights laws.

“Israel’s use of solitary confinement against children flagrantly violates international human rights standards,” said Mr. Falk, expressing his outrage that Israel even imposes solitary confinement punitively on child hunger strikers. “However, using solitary confinement as a punishment for Palestinian children who wish to peacefully protest their situation, including by commencing a hunger strike against conditions of detention, is an appalling abuse of child prisoners.”

“This pattern of abuse by Israel is grave,” the Special Rapporteur stressed. “It is inhumane, cruel, degrading, and unlawful, and, most worryingly, it is likely to adversely affect the mental and physical health of underage detainees.”

Last month, a 15-year-old Palestinian boy named Khaled was placed for five days in solitary confinement because he started a hunger strike. In another case, a 16-year-old boy was placed in solitary confinement for seven days as a punishment for hanging a Palestinian flag in their cell. Another 16-year-old boy spent 12 days in solitary confinement during the interrogation at Al Jalame interrogation center. More

 

Israel rewrites international law and Geneva conventions - New York Times

JERUSALEM — Flouting international opinion, an Israeli government-appointed commission of jurists said Monday that Israel’s presence in the West Bank was not occupation and recommended that the state grant approval for scores of unauthorized Jewish settlement outposts there.

The committee’s legal arguments, while nonbinding, could provide backup for the government should it decide to grant the outposts retroactive official status. But such a move would inevitably stir international outrage and deal a significant blow to prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.

“The report relates to the question of legality and legitimacy of the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement issued by his office, referring to the West Bank by its biblical name. He added that the report’s conclusions would be submitted to a ministerial committee on settlement affairs for discussion and that “the facts and claims” presented in the report “merit serious examination.” More

 

Israel is an apartheid regime: UN official

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights has accused the international community of complicity in Israeli settlement policies and says Israel is implementing an apartheid system.

Richard Falk United Nations Special Rapporteur

Richard Falk made the remarks during a press conference after addressing the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday and delivering a report, AFP reported.

"The international community is conspiring -- maybe unwittingly -- in a process that has no way of bringing justice to the people involved in this conflict," Falk said about the Israeli settlements.

He noted that Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are offered no protection in Israeli law, adding that their treatment is akin to apartheid.

"I think one has to begin to call the reality by a name," he said, likening the "discriminatory dualistic legal system" in the West Bank to the former system in South Africa.

Falk criticized the work of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the region as the so-called Middle East Quartet's peace envoy, calling the process “a trick rather than a way to find a solution to the problem.”

In his report, Falk also expressed concern about Israel's use of administrative detention, the expansion of settlements, and violence by settlers.

Administrative detention is a sort of imprisonment without trial or charge that allows Israel to incarcerate Palestinians for up to six months. The detention order can be renewed for indefinite periods of time. More

 

Palistinian Farmer spurns Israel’s cash offer, refuses to allow settlers on his land

Khalid Abdullah Yassin had a clear response for the Israeli government when it offered him a huge sum of money to lease from him the land upon which Israeli settlers had illegally built. He replied that the only compensation he would accept would be “your complete withdrawal from all Palestinian land.”

The high court is entirely complicit in Israel’s crimes, but its decision represents an internal contradiction to Israel’s attempt to combine the charade of a “democracy” with the continued ethnic cleansing, colonization and occupation of Palestine.

A farmer from Dura, a village near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, Yassin owns no more than 11 acres of land. Yet this small patch of Palestine, and what happens to it over the coming weeks, could forecast Israel’s outright contempt and blatant disregard for not only international law, but also its own.

In 1995, the villagers of Dura — already living in the shadow of the Israeli settlement of Beit El — began to notice that settlers were regularly encroaching on their land. While at first the settlers built temporary structures in which to celebrate their various festivals, the structures began to take on a more permanent nature and severely disrupted the agricultural life of the village.

In response to this creeping colonization of their land, the villagers started to demonstrate, and it was during one of these demonstrations that a young man, Khair Abd al-Hafiz Qasim, was killed — becoming the first martyr of many of this particular form of resistance to Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing. More

 

The face of collateral damage

Around midnight on May 21, 2010, a girl named Fatima was killed when a succession of U.S.-made Hellfire missiles, each of them five-feet long and traveling at close to 1,000 miles per hour, smashed a compound of houses in a mountain village of Mohammed Khel in North Waziristan along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Wounded in the explosions, which killed a half dozen men, Fatima and two other children were taken to a nearby hospital, where they died a few hours later.

Behram Noor, a Pakistani journalist, went to the hospital and took a picture of Fatima shortly before her death. Then, he went back to the scene of the explosions looking for evidence that might show who was responsible for the attack. In the rubble, he found a mechanism from a U.S.-made Hellfire missile and gave it to Reprieve, a British organization opposed to capital punishment, which shared photographs of the material with Salon. Reprieve executive director Clive Stafford Smith alluded to the missile fragments in an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times last fall. They have also been displayed in England.

“Forensically, it is important to show how the crime of murder happened (which is what it is here),” said Stafford Smith in an email. “One almost always uses the murder weapon in a case. But perhaps more important, I think this physical proof — this missile killed this child — is important to have people take it seriously.”

In the religious rhetoric used by al-Qaida’s online allies, Fatima was a “martyr.” In a statement quoted by Long War Journal, the al-Ansara forum said the senior al-Qaida commander Mustafa Abu Yazid had been killed in a “convoy of martyrs on the road with his wife and three daughters and his granddaughter; men, women and children; neighbors and loved ones.” But Fatima was not Yazid’s daughter, according to Noor, who reported from the scene. She was the daughter of another man who lost two wives and three children in the barrage. More

America is making enemies each time they murder people in places like Mohammed Khel in North Waziristan, or in Yemen or Somalia. It is a self defeating policy for the country, for all you are doing is creating more people that want revenge. This will obviously mean more wars, more drones and more enemies adinfinitum. And eventually the people of these areas, which may be remote and backward, but the people are ambitious and intelligent, will find a way to extract payback. They will then use Obama's argument that 'they have the right to kill anyone anywhere in the world who they feel is threatening them'. Where does this stop? Editor

Footballer’s dad asks sports world to speak out for hunger-striking son as Israel violates prisoner deal

The father of Mahmoud Sarsak, a member of the Palestinian national football team jailed without charge or trial by Israel for almost three years, has called on the sporting world to speak out for his son who remains on hunger strike after more than two months without food.

Ten days ago, more than 2,000 Palestinian prisoners ended a month-long mass hunger strike, but already Israel is violating the terms of the agreement that ended it, according to prisoners’ rights groups.

Sports community must not reward or be silent about Israeli abuses

“For us it is unbearable to see Israel has been awarded the hosting of the UEFA Under 21s football championship in 2013 and gears up to participate in the London Olympics, while it routinely arrests, tortures, imprisons and kills Palestinians, including football players, without consequence,” Mahmoud Kamel Muhammad Sarsak said in a statement given to Stop the Wall.

A poster of Mahmoud Sarsak, and some of his athletic trophies. (Rami Almeghari / The Electronic Intifada)

The younger Mahmoud Sarsak, 25, was detained by Israeli forces as he traveled from his home in Gaza to the West Bank in 2009 to join the Palestinian national football team.

“We ask fellow football players and athletes to speak out in support of Mahmoud - don’t be silent when Israeli cruelty and arbitrariness has destroyed the aspirations of a rising athlete and keeps thousands under inhumane conditions in their jails,” Sarsak said, “We ask sports teams and anti-racist fan clubs to organize in support of Mahmoud and all the other Palestinian political prisoners. Your voice can contribute to saving his life and to a little victory against injustice.”

Earlier this month, Football Beyond Borders, a student-led international organization “which uses the universal power of football to tackle political, social and cultural issues” released a letter of solidarity with Sarsak and thousands of Palestinian prisoners and announced that it would boycott the UEFA 2013 Under-21 European Championships.

And last week, Amnesty International issued an action alert calling on people to contact Israeli authorities regarding Mahmoud Sarsak. More

 

EU Foreign Ministers Criticise Israel's Activities in West Bank

Israeli settlement building and curbs on economic development in the occupied West Bank risk wrecking Palestinian hopes of creating their own state, the European Union was reported by Reuters as stating on Monday.

Clearly frustrated by long-stalled peace talks, European Union foreign ministers issued a detailed statement, accusing Israel of accelerating settlement construction and tightening its control over East Jerusalem at the expense of Palestinians.

Israel condemned the report as "biased" and said it would do nothing to help promote peace in the region.

"The EU expresses deep concern about developments on the ground, which threaten to make a two-state solution impossible," EU foreign ministers said in a statement after their Monday meeting.

The bloc also criticized what it said were worsening conditions for the Palestinians living in Area C -- the 60 percent of the West Bank which is under Israeli control and where most Jewish settlements are located.

EU ministers said Israel was forcing some Bedouin communities to leave their land in Area C, adding that economic life for Palestinians in the territory had to be improved.

"The EU calls upon Israel to meet its obligations regarding the living conditions of the Palestinian population in Area C, including ... halting forced transfer of population and demolition of Palestinian housing and infrastructure," it said. More

 

Al-Nakba

 

Palestinian hunger strikes: Media missing in action

Santa Barbara, CA - Can anyone doubt that if there were more than 1,500 prisoners engaged in a hunger strike in any country in the world other than Palestine, the media in the West would be obsessed with the story? Such an obsession would, of course, be greatest if such a phenomenon were to occur in an adversary state, such as Iran or China, but almost anywhere it would be featured news, that is, anywhere but Palestine. It would be highlighted day after day, and reported on from all angles, including the severe medical risks associated with such a lengthy refusal to take food, with respected doctors and human rights experts sharing their opinions.

At this time there are two Palestinians who were the first to start this current wave of resistance to the practice of administrative detention, Thaer Halalheh and Bilal Diab, enduring their 70th day without food. Both men are reported by respected prisoner protection association, Addameer and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, to be in critical condition with their lives hanging in the balance. Examining doctors indicated recently that both detainees were reported to "suffer from acute muscle weakness in their limbs that prevents them from standing" and are under the "dual threat" of "muscle atrophy and thromohophilia, which can lead to a fatal blood clot".

Despite this dramatic state of affairs, until today there has been scant notice taken by Western governments, media and even the United Nations, of the life threatening circumstances confronting Halalheh or Diab, let alone the massive solidarity strike that is of shorter duration, but still notable as a powerful expression of nonviolent defiance.

In contrast, consider the attention that the Western media has been devoting in recent days to a lone blind Chinese human rights lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, who managed to escape from house arrest in Beijing, find a safe haven at the US embassy, arrange a release and then seek an exit from China. This is an important and disturbing international incident, to be sure, but is it truly so much more significant than the Palestinian story as to explain the total neglect of the extraordinary exploits of thousands of Palestinians who are sacrificing their bodies, quite possibly their lives, to nonviolently protest severe mistreatment in the Israeli prison system, and by extension, the oppressiveness of an occupation that has gone on for 45 years? More

 

Palestinian Political Prisoners Subject To Collective Punishment

As organisations dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the Palestinian Council of Human Rights Organisations (PCHRO) is gravely concerned about the series of collective and punitive measures taken by the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) against Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons currently engaged in a mass hunger strike. These measures include solitary confinement, daily fines of up to 500 NIS (€100), confiscation of salt for water, the denial of electricity supply and random cell and body searches.

Also of utmost concern are the lives of Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahleh, who today began their 66th day of hunger strike. Both men are in critical condition and have been denied access to independent doctors for the majority of their hunger strike. Thaer noted that they have been subjected to significant pressure by prison doctors and the prison administration to break their hunger strike, but they are determined to continue with the strike until they are released. No decision was made in today’s Israeli High Court hearing regarding their administrative detention orders. Both Bilal and Thaer were brought to the hearing and attended in wheelchairs. During the hearing, Bilal fainted and there were no doctors present inside the court. Thaer testified to the mistreatment he has suffered since his arrest. Judge Amnon Rubenstein announced that the panel of judges would make a decision after reviewing the “secret file”, but after the review stated that the parties would be informed at a later time, without specifying when.

On 17 April 2012, Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons launched a mass hunger strike demanding an end to administrative detention, isolation and other punitive measures taken against Palestinian prisoners including the denial of family and lawyer visits, especially to prisoners from the Gaza Strip who have been denied family visits since 2007, and access to university education. The campaign has steadily gained momentum over the past two weeks and an estimated 2,500 prisoners are now on an open-ended hunger strike.

Since the beginning of the hunger strike, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) has collectively punished participating prisoners using a wide range of tactics. Most recent updates indicate that some prisoners are being fined between 250 (€50) and 500 (€100) shekels for each day of their hunger strike. In Naqab prison, prisoners are experiencing daily inspections of random sections, which last for approximately 40 to 50 minutes. These inspections include cell and body searches. In addition, prisoners are no longer permitted to leave their rooms for the daily break period. More

 

BBC challenged for ignoring plight of Palestinian prisoners

“I had no idea. How could I not have known?”

I heard those words on Palestinian Prisoners’ Day (17 April) from a teacher, shocked at discovering how Israel abducts, abuses and imprisons Palestinian children — some as young as 12 — in the West Bank because they may or may not have thrown stones atIsrael’s wall.

She had tagged along with a friend to a talk given in London by Gerard Horton of Defence for Children International–Palestine Section, and until that moment had been unaware of the brutalities of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Horton’s lecture focused on a new DCI-Palestine report which documents the various traumas Palestinian children regularly face during Israeli military detention (“Bound, Blindfolded and Convicted: Children held in military detention,” 14 April 2012).

The answer to her question is fairly simple: this woman — a member of the educated, professional middle-classes — did not know because she relies on the mainstream media, led by theBBC, for her news. And that media’s silence on the realities of Israel’s occupation is deafening.

Last week, 1,200 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails began an open-ended hunger strike in protest at the illegalities and injustices of their incarceration. Another 2,300 refused food for the duration of Palestinian Prisoners’ Day. Their action came just weeks after Khader Adnan ended his 66-day hunger strike andHana al-Shalabi was released (though banished to Gaza) after refusing food for 43 days, both protesting at Israel’s use ofadministrative detention against them.

Several other prisoners remain on long-standing hunger strikes, including 27-year-old Bilal Diab and 34-year-old Thaer Halahleh, now into their second month without food.

Extraordinary feat of resistance

If this extraordinary, mass feat of unarmed resistance, where more than a thousand men and women are willing to starve themselves to death in the struggle for liberation from an oppressive regime, was taking place in China or Iran — or any other country not behaving in the interests of the West — it would be receiving constant coverage in newspapers and on television. We would be presented with analysis, comment, talking heads, and we would know.

But these brave men and women are Palestinian, and the oppressive regime is Israel, and so the media’s curtain of self-censorship has been drawn.

Furious at this lack of coverage, Scottish activists from the We Are All Hana Shalabi Network occupied BBC Scotland headquarters on Palestinian Prisoners’ Day demanding reasons for the blackout (“Report on Glasgow’s BBC occupation and ‘Karamah hunger strike’ march,” We Are All Hana Shalabi Network, 18 April 2012). More

Hana Shalabi: A brave act of Palestinian Non-Violence

No sooner had Khader Adnan ended his 66 day life threatening hunger strike than new urgent concerns are being voiced for Hana Shalabi, another West Bank hunger striker now without food for more than 24 days. Both strikes were directed by Palestinian activists against the abusive use of administrative detention by Israeli West Bank occupying military forces, protesting both the practice of internment without charges or trial and the degrading and physically harsh treatment administered during the arrest, interrogation, and detention process.

The case of Hana Shalabi should move even the most hardhearted. She seems a young tender and normal woman who is a member of Islamic Jihad, and is dedicated to her family, hopes for marriage, and simple pleasures of shopping.

She had previously been held in administrative detention at the HaSharon prison in Israel for a 30 month period between 2009 and 2011, being released in the prisoner exchange of four months ago that freed 1027 Palestinians and the lone Israeli soldier captive,Gilad Shalit. Since her release she has been trying to recover from the deep sense of estrangement she experienced in prison, and rarely left her home or the company of her family. As she was returning to normalcy she was re-arrested in an abusive manner, which allegedly included a strip-search by a male soldier. On February 16, 2012, the day of this renewal of her administrative detention, Hana Shalabi indicated her resolve to start a hunger strike to protest her own treatment and to demand an end of administrative detention now relied upon by Israel to hold at least 309 Palestinian in prison. Her parents have been denied visitation rights, Hana Shalabi has been placed in solitary confinement, and her health has deteriorated to the point of concern for her life. Impressively, her parents have committed themselves to a hunger strike for as long as their daughter remains under administrative detention. Her mother, Badia Shalabi, has made a video in which she says that even to see food makes her cry considering the suffering of her daughter.

Despite the calls to Palestinian from liberals in the West these extraordinary hunger strikes have met with silence or indifference in both Israel and the West. Israeli authorities declare that such a posture is a voluntary action for which they have no responsibility. The UN has not raised its voice, as well. I share the view of Khitam Saafin, Chairwoman of Union of Palestinian Woman’s Committee: “The UN must be responsible for the whole violation that are going on against our people. These prisoners are war prisoners, not security prisoners, not criminals. They are freedom fighters for their rights.” The plight of Hana Shalabi is also well expressed by Yael Maron, a spokesperson for the Israeli NGO,Physicians for Human Rights- Israel: “The story of Hana Shalabi, like that of Khader Adnan, before is in my opinion a remarkable example of a struggle that’s completely nonviolent towards one’s surroundings..It is the last protest a prisoner can make, and I find it brave and inspiring.” More