AL-QUDS (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime has extended the detention of a 17-year-old Palestinian with a rare neuromuscular disorder who has been held without charge for nearly a year in what occupying regime authorities refer to as “administrative detention”.
The use of administrative detention has galvanized demonstrations across the occupied West Bank in recent months as several adult prisoners have gone on hunger strike to protest being held for months or years without charge. Some have secured their release after months of fasting that left them hospitalized and at risk of permanent neurological damage.
Amal Nakhleh, who was detained in January 2021, is one of just a handful of minors being held in administrative detention. He had a tumor removed from his lung in 2020 and suffers from myasthenia gravis, a nerve disorder that causes severe muscle fatigue.
His father, Muamar, says the occupying regime has renewed Amal’s detention three times over the past year without saying why he is being held or accusing him of any crime. “There’s no legal justification to hold him, there’s been no charge,” he said. “They just say they have secret files.”
He says his son requires regular hospital visits for testing and needs a calm environment. At a court appearance on Monday, he was told that authorities need a few more days to decide whether to renew his son’s detention.
“I saw him today,” he said. “He couldn’t move his lips, he couldn’t move his eyes, he couldn’t smile. These are symptoms of the disease... We are very worried about his health situation.”
In a separate development, Zionist settlers have trespassed Palestinian-owned land, razing a large part of it to expand a nearby settlement in the occupied West Bank.
The Palestinian official news agency WAFA cited Qasem Awwad, an official at the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission, as saying that the settlers razed about 50 dunums of land located south of the city of Nablus on Monday in order to expand the nearby settlement of Yitzhar.
According to the report, the setters have recently set up a number of settler units in the razed area to pave the way for the seizure of more land owned by Palestinians from the town of Huwara and the villages of Burin and Asira al-Qibliya in Nablus Province.
In the village of Isawiyya, northeast of East Al-Quds, bulldozers razed land, and demolished a car wash on Monday.
WAFA reported that the razed land belonged to Fadi Alyan, a guard at Al-Aqsa Mosque, whom the occupying regime has had under detention since last year.