Israeli police forces on Saturday refused to let 12 Israeli peace activists visit hunger-striking Palestinian prisoner Samer Issawi at Israel’s Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot. Two female activists were briefly detained after they tried to break into Issawi’s room.
Earlier Israel rejected appeals to release the Palestinian prisoner on a life-endangering long-term hunger strike to the West Bank, prisoners affairs minister Issa Qaraqe told AFP.
Qaraqe said that Israeli officials told him on Saturday that Samer Issawi, who has intermittently refused food for more than eight months, “is in critical condition and might die at any moment.” Issawi, 33, was first arrested in 2002 and sentenced to 26 years for militant activity in the leftist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Palestinian activists display a poster in support of Palestinian prisoner Samer Issawi with at their background a cloud of tear gas during a demonstration against the occupation and in support of Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank city of Hebron, March 1st, 2013 (Photo: Activestills)
He was released by Israel under a prisoner swap in October 2011, but rearrested last July for violating the terms of the agreement by travelling to the Israeli-occupied West Bank from annexed Arab east Jerusalem.
Issawi’s health has deteriorated because of his prolonged fast, and he was being held in an Israeli hospital. The Israeli official said he could “immediately be released to Gaza.” Qaraqe said that the Palestinians had requested that he be released temporarily to the West Bank. “We proposed that they release him to Ramallah for a while and they refused,” he said.
“We agreed to send him to Europe for a few months to receive medical treatment and then come back again but they refused.” The Israeli official said on Friday that Israel had told the European Union and the United Nations that it was willing to free Issawi and deport him overseas but his lawyer said his client strongly rejected the proposal.
Issawi is the last of four Palestinian prisoners who were on extended hunger strikes in Israeli prisons, after two ended their fast in February and a third was exiled from the West Bank last month to the Gaza Strip for 10 years. Issawi from his bed in the hospital send a letter, published in Haaretz by the journalist Gideon Levy. Samer Issawi writes in his letter: “I’ve chosen to write to you: intellectuals, academics, writers, lawyers, journalists and activists in civilian Israeli society… Israelis, I’m looking for an educated one among you who has passed the stage of the shadows and mirrors game. I want him to look at me as I lose my consciousness. Let him wipe the gunpowder from his pen, the shooting sounds from his mind, and see my face’s features etched in his eyes. I will see him and he will see me. I will see how tense he is about the future and he will see me, a ghost clinging to his side and not leaving. Perhaps you will be asked to write a romantic story about me. You will testify I was a creature of whom nothing remained but a skeleton, breathing and choking from hunger, losing consciousness now and then. And after your cold silence, my story will be an achievement to add to your resume. When your students will grow up they will believe the Palestinian died of hunger … Then you can celebrate your cultural, moral supremacy with a death ritual.”
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