Khader Adnan

For the last week or so, I’ve woken up most days wondering if Khader Adnan is still alive. Adnan is a from a small village near the West Bank city of Jenin; his pregnant wife and two young daughters still live there. He was seized from his home by Israeli soldiers in December last year and has been on hunger strike ever since.

Like so many Palestinian prisoners Adnan is being held under the old British Mandate emergency measure called ‘administrative detention’, under which the Israeli authorities imprison thousands of Palestinians every year without charge. As of today, Khader Adnan has been refusing food for 64 days. Reports say he is in a coma, but in one of those grotesqueries at which the Israelis seem to excel, is still shackled to his hospital bed. Adnan is – to the best of my knowledge – still alive at this moment, but the comparisons with Bobby Sands and the other Maze Prison Republican hunger strikers of 1981 are already flying around the internet.

Amnesty International has a petition for the release of Khader Adnan and an end to the use of administrative detention by the State of Israel here.