CAIRO (MEMO) – Egypt and the United Nations are trying to pressure the Zionist regime to end the detention of Palestinian prisoner and hunger striker Hisham Abu Hawash, media reports say.
Al-Mayadeen quoted sources as saying that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement Secretary-General, Daoud Shehab, informed Egyptian authorities that the resistance would not remain “silent upon Israel’s attempts to kill Abu Hawash.”
In a statement, Shehab warned that the movement would consider Abu Hawash’s martyrdom as an “assassination carried out by the Israeli occupation with premeditation”.
“If Abu Hawash is martyred, the PIJ will deal with the matter in accordance with its commitment to respond to any assassination,” Shehab stressed.
In a similar context, the spokesman for the Gaza-based Palestinian Prisoners Information Office, Moaz Abu Sharkh, said that Abu Hawash’s life was “in grave danger,” noting that he had lost the ability to hear and speak.
The Palestinian Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs Commission recently reported that Abu Hawash’s health was at a “very critical and dangerous stage.” The commission’s spokesperson, Hassan Abd Rabbo, said that the hunger-striking prisoner now weighs 40 kilograms and his organs were “shutting down”. Abu Hawash has been on hunger strike for 136 days.
Abu Hawash is one of about 60 prisoners and administrative detainees who are on hunger strike against the occupying regime’s policy of the so-called administrative detention.
Administrative detention permits Zionist regime authorities to keep a prisoner in custody indefinitely without prosecution or trial.
A father of five, Abu Hawash was arrested by regime authorities on 27 October, 2020 under administrative detention.
At least 500 of around 4,550 Palestinian inmates in the occupying regime’s prisons are administrative detainees, according to institutions monitoring the situation and treatment of prisoners.