BETHLEHEM,
West Bank, August 18 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Palestinian
women held in the Israeli prison of Neve Tirtza near Tel Aviv ended a
17-day hunger strike late Sunday, August 18, following positive
discussions with the prison authorities, their lawyer said.
"The
prisoners have agreed to stop their hunger strike after 17 days,
following talks with the jail administrators who promised to [try to]
solve their demands," lawyer Mamun al-Hashim told Agence
France-Press(AFP).
Some
40 Palestinian prisoners started their hunger strike in early August
after the prison sent four women to solitary confinement, Hashim said.
Another four women were put in isolation after the start of the
strike, he added.
However,
she denied the sanitary problem in the prison, claiming instead that
the detainees had flooded and vandalized their cells, forcing the
wardens to take what she described as "disciplinary
measures."
Meanwhile,
thousands of Palestinians arrested in Israel's massive military sweeps
of the West Bank are being held in harsh conditions, rights groups
said Sunday.
Since
late March, Israel has stormed and reoccupied West Bank towns and
villages and has locked up thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians
whom it claims are suspected of planning anti-Israeli attacks, Agence
France-Press(AFP) reported August 18, 2002.
The
prisoners number 6,000, with some 1,800 being held in administrative
detention, a relic of British inter-war rule, according to Issa
Qaraqi, head of the Bethlehem-based Palestinian Prisoners Club.
An
army spokesman said some 2,600 Palestinians were being held in the
three main detention centers.
The
administrative detention procedure, left over from emergency laws
applied during the British mandate period, means the Palestinians can
be held for extended periods without being formally charged.
The
detainees have been idling in the military camps of Ofer, near
Ramallah in the West Bank, Megiddo in northern Israel, and Ketziot in
the Negev desert, known among Palestinians as Ansar III, as well as
other army interrogation centers around the country.
Human
rights activists are concerned about the situation in the camps, where
detainees are cut off from the outside world waiting for authorities
to complete case-by-case investigations.
"The
Ofer camp has many wounded and ill and we have asked without success
to be allowed to treat them," Noam Lebel, spokesman for the
Association of Civil Rights in Israel, told AFP.
"As
for Ketziot, it is very bad. During the day it is extremely hot and at
night very cold," said Lebel, adding that Palestinian detainees
in this desert camp are confined to tents.
Many
have not changed their clothes since they were arrested and the army
has not allowed their families to bring them fresh clothes or
provisions, Lebel added.
Mohammed
Berghal, a Palestinian lawyer, says the conditions in Ketziot are
terrible: “Toilets are basic, beds are often just pieces of wood
laid out on the earth, and the tents are crammed.
“It
is particularly difficult for the 240 of the 900 Palestinians at
Ketziot who are held in administrative detention,” Berghal told AFP.
He
said some prisoners had been held for months without even being
questioned by security interrogators, who according to Israeli media
reports have been busy by the whole number of people detained in
Israel's continual raids of the West Bank.
However,
Tamar Peleg, a lawyer from the Center for the Defense of the
Individual, an Israeli rights group, disagreed. The prisoners are
"cut-off deliberately from the rest of the world, without press,
radio or television," Peleg said.
The
prisoners' lawyers are often barred from seeing them, even in cases
when they have received special permission to visit, said Peleg, whose
organization brings human right violations in the occupied territories
before Israeli courts.
