Expanded use of incarceration without trial has sparked a mass hunger strike set for Tuesday, but army officials say it continues to reduce terror
The number of
Palestinians held in Israeli prisons without trial has risen by some 50
percent over the past year and, with several of them on hunger strike
for more than a month, they are at the forefront of what Defense
Minister Ehud Barak recently called “increasing disquiet” among
Palestinians in the West Bank.
Administrative detention — incarceration
without trial — is used as a preventive arrest, in advance of a crime,
and it is not illegal. According to Article 78 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention, an occupying power may, “for imperative reasons of
security,” subject people to internment.
But it is, by all accounts, a harsh measure.
Opponents refer to it as a form of “torture”; proponents deem it an
effective terror-fighting “tool.” Perhaps on account of its nature — the
detainee is never formally charged with a crime, never stands trial,
and never knows the full duration of his or her continually renewable
term of incarceration – it has been met with staunch Palestinian
resistance.
Khader Adnan, a baker by trade and an alleged
member of Islamic Jihad from the village of Arabe near Jenin, was
administratively detained for the third time on December 17, 2011. The
following day, he stopped taking food and fluid. Sixty-six days later,
he had lost his hair and some 30 kilograms and was close to death.
Israel, fearing the repercussions of a death behind bars — the first
intifada was sparked by a traffic accident — decided to “offset the days
in which the appellant was detained for the purpose of a criminal
investigation prior to his administrative detention from the period of
the current administrative detention order” and set a firm April 17 date
for his release. Adnan, in return, agreed to end the strike. Read the rest on: The Times of Israel
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