Israel: Deal agreed to end hunger strike

Palestinian prisoners yesterday called off a month-long hunger strike in exchange for Israeli concessions, including an unprecedented, if limited, curb on Israel’s practice of detaining suspects without charges or trial.

The hunger strike had drawn scrutiny of Israeli detention practices and raised fears it would spark off major unrest in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Agreement to the deal, brokered by Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, was announced last night by the Palestinian prisoner affairs minister, Issa Karakeh, who said prisoner leaders meeting in Ashkelon Prison in southern Israel had reviewed and signed the pact.

Israeli officials confirmed the deal. They stressed they had won an unprecedented commitment by prisoners to “completely halt terrorist activity” inside the prisons, including recruitment, guidance and finance for attacks.

The agreement ends the strike by more than 1,600 prisoners, a third of the number held by Israel. Two of the prisoners, Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahleh, helped inspire the wider strike by ceasing to eat 75 days ago and there was growing international concern they would die. Most of the other prisoners began hunger strike on 17 April. The prisoners range from those convicted of lethal bombings of civilian targets to stone throwers.

Mr Diab and Mr Halahleh, of the militant Islamic Jihad group, are among more than 300 Palestinian administrative detainees, jailed in a practice first deployed by British mandatory authorities before Israel’s creation. Administrative detention gives a military judge the power to detain without charge or trial for renewable periods of six months, based on secret evidence.

Israel says the practice is needed for security and to prevent the exposure of its network of Palestinian informants. But the hunger strike has prompted some Israelis to reconsider, with public security minister Yitzhak Aharonovich saying recently that the practice was being used too frequently.

According to yesterday’s deal, Israel agreed that the sentences of serving administrative detainees will not be extended unless there is new evidence against them – but the practice is not being scrapped entirely.

Israel also agreed that relatives of prisoners in its jails from the Gaza Strip would be allowed to visit them for the first time since 2007, when the visits were discontinued in response to Hamas’s takeover of the coastal enclave. Israel also agreed to return prisoners held in solitary confinement to the general wings.

In an official announcement, the Israeli government said it hoped the prisoner agreement would encourage Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to return to peace negotiations, which he has shunned because of Israel’s refusal to halt settlement activity in the West Bank.

“We hope this gesture will serve to build confidence between the parties and further peace,” the statement said.

Palestine Liberation Organisation spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi termed the agreement “a victory not only for the prisoners and their families but also for millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories and in exile”. She said: “They have truly demonstrated non-violent resistance is an essential tool in our struggle for freedom.”