WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Palestinian prisoner Miqdad al-Qawasmi has agreed to end his hunger strike which has been ongoing for 113 days as Zionist regime prison authorities have agreed to release him in February, the Palestinian Information Center reported.
Director of the Prisoners’ Information Office, Nahid al-Fakhouri, announced that an agreement had been reached to release al-Qawasmi after “long and arduous rounds of dialogue waged by the Higher Leadership Committee of Hamas Prisoners.”
Committee head Salama al-Qatawi, and the body’s foreign affairs official “met the heroic prisoner Miqdad al-Qawasmi and were assured of his health,” al-Fakhouri added.
Al-Qawasmi launched a hunger strike in protest at his continued so-called administrative detention – imprisonment without charge or trial – which was renewed last Thursday and he was ordered to be moved from the intensive care unit at Kaplan Hospital to the Ramle Prison Clinic.
Miqdad Al-Qawasmi’s weight has nearly halved since 21 July, when he began refusing food and drinking only water with salt, his family says.
Earlier on Wednesday his lawyer, Jawad Boulos, quoting Zionist prisons officials, said Qawasmeh’s “can’t move even in wheelchair,” the Palestinian Information Center reported, adding that the prisoner’s immobility refutes claims by Zionist regime authorities that his health has improved.
Boulos further noted that the prison administration had refused to let him see Qawasmeh during his visit to the prison as his health condition is alarming.
Qawasmeh, who suffers serious health complications in his lungs, kidney, and liver, went on hunger strike to protest Israel’s illegal administrative detention policy, which allows the regime to hold prisoners for long periods of time without charge or trial.
He has been in administrative detention, with no trial or indictment, since January.
Other Palestinian prisoners who have recently launched hunger strikes against their administrative detentions include Alaa al-Araj and Hisham Abu Hawash, who have gone without food for 95 and 86 days respectively.
There are 4,600 Palestinian prisoners in the Zionist regime’s jails, 500 of them serving ‘administrative detention’.