A prominent Palestinian-French human rights lawyer has gone on a hunger strike in protest against his imprisonment without charge by Israeli authorities for the last six months.
Salah Hamouri, 37, a father of two from occupied East Jerusalem, has been held in administrative detention since March 7th, and his detention order has been renewed until at least early December based on unidentified evidence.
Hamouri began a hunger strike on Sunday against Israeli practice that is routinely used against Palestinians who are subject to Israel's military rather than civil justice system, along with 29 other people held in administrative detention in prisons around Israel.
A member of the JusticeforSalah campaign said that negotiations with Israeli officials did not yield results on Wednesday. The human rights lawyer has been moved to a 2 x 2 sq metre isolation cell in Hadarim, a maximum security prison.
Administrative detention in Israeli military law allows suspects to be arrested without charge or access to evidence against them for a period of six months, on the grounds that he or she may break the law in future.
Israel says the measure, which is also used by the Palestinian Authority, is necessary to foil terrorist attacks and not reveal sensitive intelligence sources. Rights groups allege it is used excessively by Israeli authorities and denies individuals the right to due process.
Palestinian prisoners rights group Addameer, where Hamouri works, 743 Palestinians are held in administrative detention, the highest number for six years.
Hamouri has been arrested on several previous occasions and served a seven-year sentence between 2005 and 11 for his alleged role in a plot to assassinate a chief rabbi.
After three years of pre-trial detention, he decided to take a plea bargain on the advice of his lawyer in order to avoid a 14 year-long sentence or deportation to France, which would most likely mean losing his Israel-issued Jerusalem residency.
In 2016, his pregnant wife, the French national Elsa Lefort, was deported after arriving at Tel Aviv airport and given a 10 year entry ban. She and the couple's two young children live in France and have not been allowed to visit or even speak to Hamouri on the phone since he was arrested in March.
Salah has never stopped being vocal about the occupation. He is always speaking at events in France and tours, talking about the conditions of political prisoners and other violations, said a spokeswoman for JusticeforSalah.
Treating him like this is a way to try and silence him, break him, and send a message to other human rights defenders. One of the four legal cases against which Hamouri is fighting is a concern for rights organisations: in a legal first, the lawyer's Jerusalem residency was revoked in October 2021 on the grounds of a breach of allegiance to the Israeli state, based on secret evidence. A final hearing in the residency case is scheduled for February 2023.
The last high-profile Palestinian hunger strike involved the Islamic Jihad member Khalil Awawdeh, who was almost dead after going without food for nearly six months. He ended his strike in August after Israel agreed to release him when the administrative detention order ends on Sunday.