Force-Feeding: Israel’s Legal Torture Method

By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer Force-feeding the Palestinian prisoners is the way the Zionist regime of Israel has chosen to deal with this non-violent protest against administrative detention. It is yet another serious violation of international law: torture.

Date: 16 August 2015 - 21:49

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Among the countries that deploy force-feeding against hunger strikers is also Israel's "enlightened ally", the United States. The U.S. has been force-feeding inmates in Guantanamo for many years now.

Nevertheless, hunger strikes are a form of speech for Palestinian prisoners who have no other way to communicate their concerns. Hunger strikes give them the means to protest their confinement and to send a message about that illegal confinement.

The Zionist regime has already passed the widely opposed law allowing the force-feeding of Palestinian prisoners. Little wonder the Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council, the Arab Association for Human Rights, Adalah, and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel are fighting back. They say many Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike "seek to live, but a life of dignity and freedom."

In a statement released this week, United Nations experts also affirmed Palestinian prisoners’ right to make this choice: "Hunger strikes are a non-violent form of protest used by individuals who have exhausted other forms of protest to highlight the seriousness of their situations. The right to peaceful protest is a fundamental human right."

The case is pitting the UN experts against Israel, whose leaders directly cite the U.S. practice of force-feeding people incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay when justifying the legislation. The UN has opposed the legislation, denouncing the force-feeding as torture, urging Israeli physicians not to participate.

As it stands, hunger strikes are a common tactic used to protest Israel's use of administrative detention, in which Palestinians are detained without charge or trial under a system of military law.

According to Palestinian human rights organization Addameer, in April 2015, there were 5,800 political prisoners in Israeli jails, including 414 Palestinians in administrative detention.
This is while the usurper regime has escalated a crackdown on numerous prisons, declaring a state of alert and banning Palestinians from holding their Friday prayer amid growing outrage at the treatment of  hunger strikers.

For decades, the international community, including the International Red Cross, the World Medical Association, and the United Nations, has recognized the right of prisoners of sound mind to go on a hunger strike. Force-feeding has been labeled a violation on the ban of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.

The World Medical Association holds that it is unethical for the Israeli doctors to participate in force-feeding. Put simply, force-feeding of Palestinian prisoners – locked up for years without charges - has to stop because it violates international law.