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Palestinian Prisoners On Hunger Strike; Israel Debates Force-Feeding

Palestinian Prisoners On Hunger Strike; Israel Debates Force-Feeding

By Batsheva Sobelman, Los Angeles Times

JERUSALEM — Israeli authorities hospitalized 40 Palestinian detainees Tuesday who were taking part in a weeks-long hunger strike, according to media and prison service officials.

The Palestinians are part of a larger group of prisoners who have refused food for nearly five weeks in protest of Israel’s use of administrative detention, which allows holding individuals without charge or trial for various periods of time.

According to prisoner service spokeswoman Sivan Weizman, the detainees were in fair health and were hospitalized for medical evaluation as part of standing protocol, not as a result of any marked deterioration in their health.

A total of 240 Palestinian detainees and prisoners are taking part in the hunger strike, consuming water but no food, Weizman said. They can opt for offered supplements but authorities cannot force these.

The strike comes as Israel debates legislation that would allow for force-feeding of striking prisoners. The protest has come to the attention of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and relatives of the detainees also have appealed to Pope Francis.

In the West Bank, the strike is marked with small, daily protests in a number of cities. On Wednesday morning, activists blocked the staff from entering offices of the International Red Cross in Ramallah in protest of the organization’s perceived silence.

In the past, high-profile hunger strikes have posed a serious challenge to Israeli authorities, drawing international criticism of the controversial legal procedure and threatening diplomatic crisis.

In 2013, Samer Issawi’s eight-month hunger strike put his life at risk and left Israeli authorities at a loss for a response. Concerned about a backlash if he died in custody, Israel released Issawi when his health was at serious risk.

Now, in an initiative fiercely criticized by both medical and political circles, Israel is considering legislation to allow force feeding hunger strikers in prison.

Last week, a ministerial committee on legislation gave preliminary approval to a bill that would allow a judge to authorize feeding a striking prisoner as well as administering medical treatment against the inmate’s will.

According to the proposal, only the president or senior judge of a district court would be allowed to permit — but not order — such treatment. Prisoners would have the right to legal representation in related hearings, and prison doctors would not be forced to act against their conscience.

The bill, proposed as an amendment to the existing law regulating prison protocol, would have to pass three readings in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, before becoming law. It would not apply to the current strike.

Despite the built-in restrictions, Israeli medical professionals and activists strongly protest the bill they say contravenes universal medical ethics and international protocol defining forced feeding of prisoners as a form of torture.

The Israel Medical Association. has long voiced its opposition to the legislation. Last year, most members of the national council on bioethics voted against it as well.

Following the ministers’ initial clearance of the proposal last week, Leonid Edelman, chairman of the Israel Medical Association, and Avinoam Reches, head of the organization’s ethics committee, sent Justice Minister Tzipi Livni an urgent letter asking for her to appeal the decision and revise the government’s position on the matter.

Also addressed to Israel’s prime minister, health minister and attorney general, the letter reiterated the association’s “express objection” to the law that is both “ethically and professionally wrong.”

Force-feeding hunger strikers poses a concrete threat to their health and contravenes the principle of nonmaleficence — “cause no harm” — the basic code of medical ethics, they wrote.

The doctors also warned of international repercussions of such legislation that “has no place in modern society.” Moreover, they reject a law that “puts doctors on a front that isn’t theirs, in complete contravention of professional and ethical duties.”

In addition, the issue is highly political, as the overwhelming majority of hunger-striking prisoners in Israel are Palestinians who use it as a means of political protest.

In a joint letter to Israel’s attorney general in February, Physicians for Human Rights and the rights group Adallah said the law was proposed to “break the morale of hunger-striking Palestinian political prisoners.”

Critics also question the need for special legislation for prisoners, arguing the existing law already allows physicians to make decisions not in keeping with patients’ will in certain circumstances.

Other countries are grappling with the sensitive issue as well. Recently, a U.S. judge permitted the Pentagon to forcefully feed a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, although the practice remains highly controversial.

Maxnathans via Flickr
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Imprisoned U.S. Contractor Ends Hunger Strike In Cuba

Imprisoned U.S. Contractor Ends Hunger Strike In Cuba

By Juan O. Tamayo, The Miami Herald

U.S. government subcontractor Alan P. Gross, jailed in Havana for more than four years, called off a weeklong hunger strike but said there will be “further protests” against his treatment by the Cuban and U.S. governments.

“My protest fast is suspended as of today (Friday), although there will be further protests to come,” Gross was quoted as telling his Washington lawyer, Scott Gilbert, in a statement released by the family’s public relations firm.

“There will be no cause for further intense protest when both governments show more concern for human beings and less malice and derision toward each other,” the statement quoted Gross as saying.
Gross added that he had suspended his hunger strike, launched April 3, on Friday, because his mother asked him to stop, according to the statement. She will be 92 years old on Tuesday, the first day of Passover.

He had told Gilbert last week that he was not eating food but was taking liquids, and that he had lost 10 pounds, on top of the 100 pounds he shed after his arrest in Havana on Dec. 3, 2009.

The 64-year-old development specialist from Potomac, Md., is serving a 15-year sentence for delivering communications equipment, paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development, to Cuban Jews. The equipment would have allowed direct access to the Internet, bypassing government filters and monitors.

Gilbert reported Tuesday that Gross had told him he started the fast after learning of an Associated Press report that USAID had launched a secret Twitter-like platform after his arrest, despite the risk that it would complicate his situation in Havana.

A Cuban foreign ministry official said the next day that her government was “concerned” about the hunger strike, saying he was imprisoned in a hospital to ensure proper medical care.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

U.S. Now Calls Guantanamo Hunger Strike ‘Long Term Non-Religious Fasting’

U.S. Now Calls Guantanamo Hunger Strike ‘Long Term Non-Religious Fasting’

By Carol Rosenberg, The Miami Herald

MIAMI — The Defense Department has released its 3-month-old Guantanamo forced-feeding protocol, a 24-page how-to document that rhetorically recasts the yearlong hunger strike in the remote prison camps as “long term non-religious fasting.”

The release blacks out the portions of the document that define how much weight loss and how many missed meals qualifies a hunger-striking captive for the prison’s twice-daily tube feedings.

Some prison spokesmen had argued that the captives were manipulating their weight loss to qualify as hunger strikers — and to focus attention on their indefinite detention at the prison, where about half of the 155 prisoners are approved for release if the Obama administration reaches resettlement or repatriation agreements for them.

It does, however, appear to include a medical calculus for how much to force-feed a morbidly obese hunger striker.

It also includes this instruction: “If the RN (nurse) or HM (medic) feels they are in any danger of personal harm during an enteral feed, they are to withdraw from the situation and immediately inform the guards of their concerns.”

The document — dated Dec. 16, 2013 — describes the health challenge that caused the military to send in additional medics last year as “weight loss,” and calls forced-feedings “involuntary enteral feedings.” With the reinforcements still there, the prison now has a nearly 1-to-1 ratio of U.S. Navy medical staff to captives.

Asked via email Tuesday how many of the 155 captives are considered to be “non-religious fasters” and how many are receiving “enteral feedings,” spokesman Cmdr. John Filostrat replied, “Our policy at JTF-GTMO (Joint Task Force-Guantanamo) is to not publicly issue the number of detainees who choose not to eat as a matter of protest.”

More than 100 prisoners were on hunger strike over the summer, with the prison handling an all-time high of 46 captives getting tube feedings in July, a time when the military issued daily figures.

Participation dropped to as low as 11 in mid-November and was at 15 on Dec. 2 by the military’s own count when the prison stopped its nine-month practice of daily transparency and imposed a blackout on disclosures. It then drew up the new procedures that dropped the term “hunger strike” used in its earlier ” Standard Operating Procedures.”

At the U.S. Southern Command in Doral, Fla., the Pentagon outpost with oversight of the prison, Marine Gen. John Kelly had derided the protest as “hunger strike lite,” and openly differed with President Barack Obama’s description of his troops as “force-feeding” prisoners.

The new terminology more closely aligns with the general’s language of choice on the long-running protest by an undisclosed number of captives receiving prison-mandated tube feedings.

AFP Photo/Chantal Valery