DM Monitoring
UNITED NATIONS: The death of Palestinian hunger striker Khader Adnan in Israel’s custody must be accounted for, UN experts said Wednesday, calling the Jewish State’s mass arbitrary detention of Palestinians “cruel” and “inhumane.”
The 45-year-old Palestinian died in his prison cell on Tuesday following a nearly three-month hunger strike.
He had been protesting Israel’s widespread policy of arbitrarily detaining Palestinians in “abhorrent conditions” and in violation of fair trial guarantees.
The call for greater accountability came from the expert, or Special Rapporteur, on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, and the Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Tlaleng Mofokeng.
Adnan began his hunger strike protest shortly after being arrested – for the last time – on Feb. 5, facing terrorism-related charges.
Despite the serious deterioration of his health, Israeli authorities refused to release him, or transfer him to hospital, and continued to detain him in a prison hospital facility, without providing adequate healthcare, the experts said in a joint statement issued in Geneva.
The Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council-appointed experts noted that Adnan had been arrested at least 12 times in the past, spending a total of around eight years in prison, mostly in administrative detention, and had been on hunger strike five times previously.
“The death of Khader Adnan is a tragic testament to Israel’s cruel and inhumane detention policy and practices, as well as the international community’s failure to hold Israel accountable in the face of callous illegalities perpetrated against Palestinian inmates,” the experts said.
The experts noted that Israel currently holds approximately 4,900 Palestinians in its prisons, including just over 1,000 administrative detainees who are held for an indefinite period without trial or charge, based on secret information.
The number of administrative detainees in Israeli detention facilities is at its highest since 2008, despite repeated condemnation from international human rights bodies and calls for Israel to immediately end the practice.
The UN rights office OHCHR said in its press release, that many Palestinian prisoners have resorted to hunger strikes to “protest the brutality of Israel’s detention practices”.
The experts said they could not separate Israel’s prison policies, “from the colonial nature of its occupation, intended to control and subjugate all Palestinians in the territory Israel wants to control”.
“The systematic practice of administrative detention, is tantamount to a war crime of willfully depriving protected persons of the rights of fair and regular trial”, said the two experts.
They added that it was ever more urgent for the international community to hold Israel accountable for its illegal acts in the occupied territory and stop the normalization of war crimes.
“How many more lives will have to be lost, before an inch of justice can be delivered in the occupied Palestinian territory?” they concluded.
On his part, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a ‘thorough investigation’ into Adnan’s death.
“Israeli authorities must ensure that the circumstances of his death are thoroughly investigated,” UN deputy spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters in New York on Tuesday.
“The secretary-general reiterates his call on Israel to end the practice of administrative detention. All those held in administrative detention should be promptly charged and tried in a court of law or released without delay,” he said.
