Um Fagara is in area C, under both Israeli military and administrative control. It has been subject to a range of evacuations, abuse and demolitions by the Israeli military in recent years. On 24 November, 2011, the Israeli army demolished two houses, a mosque, a barn and a structure containing the village’s generator. Two Palestinian girls were also arrested. They were released several days later.

Despite the close ‘supervision’ of the Israeli police from a hilltop above, most of the walls of the house were finished. The house was paid for by ACTED (Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development) together with the Humanitarian Relief Fund (HRF), managed by UN OCHA.

Around 6pm, village elders from Um Fagara and members of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee detailed their personal experiences of life in Um Fagara under Israeli occupation. They also thanked the activists for their help.
ACTED (Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development) together with the Humanitarian Relief Fund (HRF), managed by UN OCHA, have also funded the construction of a new mosque in Um Fagara and acquired several mobile caravans for the town. They are all under demolition orders from the Israeli military.

“My Beloved Lamar, forgive me because the occupation took me away from you, and took away from me the pleasure of witnessing my first born child that I have always prayed to God to see, to kiss, to be happy with. It is not your fault, this is our destiny as Palestinian people to have our lives and the lives of our children taken away from us, to be apart from each other and to have a miserable life, nothing is complete in our lives because of this unjust occupation that is lurking on every corner of our lives turning it into eeriness, a continuous pursuit and torture. Despite that I was deprived from holding you and hearing your voice, from watching you grow up and move around in the house and in your be, and that I was deprived of my rule as a human and a father with my daughter your existence has given me all the power and hope, and when I saw your picture with your mother in the sit-in tent, you were so calm staring in wonder at people, as if you were looking for your father, looking at my pictures that are hung inside the tent asking in silence why is my father not coming back, I felt that you are with me, in my sentiment and inside my mind, as if you are a part of my heartbeats, steadfast and the blood that flows in my veins, opening all doors for me spreading clear skies around me, and unleashing your free childish voice after this long silence”.

“Lamar my love: I know that you are not to be blamed and that you don’t yet understand why your father is going through this battle of the hunger strike for the 75th day, but when you grow up you will understand that the battle of freedom is the battle of going back to you, so that I can never be taken away from you again or to be deprived of your smile or seeing you, so that the occupier will never kidnap me again from you”.

“When you grow up you will understand how injustice was brought upon your father and upon thousands of Palestinians whom the occupation has put in prisons and jail cells, shattering their lives and future for no guilt but their pursuit of freedom, dignity and independence, you will know that your father did not tolerate injustice and submission, that he will never accept insult and compromise, and that he is going through a hunger strike to protest against the Jewish state that wants to turn us into humiliated slaves without any rights or patriotic dignity”.

“My beloved Lamar keep your head up always and be proud of your father, and thank everyone who supported me, who supported the prisoners in their struggle, and don’t be afraid god is with us always, and god never lets people who have faith and patience, we are righteous, and right will always prevail against injustice and wrong doers”.

“Lamar my love: that day will come, and I will make it up to you for everything, and tell you the whole story, and your days that will follow will be more beautiful, so let your days pass now and wear your prettiest clothes, run and then run again in the gardens of your long life, go forward and forward nothing is behind you but the past, and this is your voice I hear all the time as a melody of freedom”.

Translated by :IMEU : http://imeu.net/

In the name of Allah, Most Compassionate, Most Merciful,

Praise be to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon the Messenger of Allah.

Dear free people of the world. Dear oppressed and disenfranchised around the globe. Dear friends of our people, who stood with me with a stern belief in freedom and dignity for my people and our prisoners languishing in the Occupation’s prisons.

Dear free women and men, young and elderly, ordinary people as well as intellectual elites everywhere – I address you today with an outpouring of hope and pain for every Palestinian that suffers from the occupation of his land, for each of us that has been killed, wounded or imprisoned by the state of terror, that denies anything beautiful in our lives, even the smile of our children and families. I am addressing you in my first letter following my release – praying it will not be the last – after Allah granted me freedom, pride and dignity. I was an “administrative detainee” in the jail of occupation for four months, out of which I have spent 66 days on hunger strike.

I was driven to declare an open-ended hunger strike by the daily harassment and violation of my people’s rights by the Israeli Zionist occupation. The last straw for me were the ongoing arrests, the brutal nighttime raid on my house, my violent detention, during which I was taken to the “Mavo Dotan” settlement on our land occupied 1967, and the beatings and humiliation I was treated to during arrest interrogation. The way I was treated during the interrogation at the Jalameh detention center, using the worse and lowest verbal insults in the dictionary. After questioning, I was sentenced to imprisonment under administrative detention with no charges, which proves mine and others’ arrests serve only to maintain a quota of prisoners, to harass us, to restrict our freedom and to undermine our determination, pride and dignity.

I write today to thank all those who stood tall in support of my people, with our prisoners, with Hana al-Shalabi and with myself. I call on you to stand for justice pride and dignity in the face of occupation. The assault on the freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people is an assault on free people of the world by a criminal occupation that threatens the security, freedom and dignity of all, no matter where.

Please, continue in exposing this occupation, boycotting and isolating it internationally. Expose it’s true face, the one that was clearly exposed in the attack of an Israeli officer on our Danish cohort. Unlike that attack, the murder our people is a crime that goes by unspoken of and slips away from the lens of the camera. Our prisoners are dying in silence. Hundreds of defenders of freedom are on hunger strike inside the prisons, including the eight knights, Bilal Diab and Thaer Hlahalh, who are now on their 61st day of hunger strike, Hassan Safadi, Omar Abu Shalal, Mahmoud Sarsak, Mahmoud Sarsal, Mohammad Taj, Jaafar Azzedine (who was arrested solely for standing in solidarity with myself) and Ahmad haj Ali. Their lives now are in great danger.

We are all responsible and we will all lose if we anything happen to them. Let us take immediate action to pressure the Occupation into releasing them immediately, or their children could never forgive us.

Let all those free and revolutionary join hands against the Occupation’s oppression, and take to the streets – in front of the Occupation’s prisons, in front of its embassies and all other institutions backing it around the world.

With deep appreciation,
Khader Adnan

Excerpt from The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Israeli historian Ilan Pappé:

Irgun and Stern Gang, the Jewish forces, stormed into the village of Deir Yassin on this day 63 years ago, they sprayed the houses with machine gun fire, killing many. They raped and killed some of the women, they gathered the remaning villagers in one place and shot them all in cold blood.

Fahim Zaydan was 12 at the time;

“They took us out one after the other; shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him infront of us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him- carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her- they shot her too.”

Zaydan was shot too (he survived) when the troops lined up children against a wall and sprayed them with bullets “just for the fun of it”.

Research suggests that between 93-170 people were massacred, although this list doesn’t include the number of people killed during the fighting.

Going through security, the Israeli security guards asked each person if they spoke Hebrew, then if they spoke Arabic. The first of the internationals to go through was an American woman. She answered the questions, admitting that she spoke no Hebrew, but she did speak Arabic. She explains,

“They laughed and said something in Hebrew that I didn’t understand, and I was pointed into another room and told to empty my pockets and take off my belt for a second time. The guard waved the wand over me, then groped me. She claimed she had to check the pockets that were on the front of my shirt, but rather than pull the front of my shirt away from my body, she roughly squeezed my breasts. She then put her hands inside all of my pants pockets, which did not happen to the other internationals, who do not speak Arabic. I felt humiliated and violated, and I felt like I wasn’t in a position to say no. I am very familiar with the discomfort of security pat-downs, but this went far beyond that. I can only explain this as part of the ongoing discrimination, humiliation and violations of human rights that are part of the occupation.”

After the four of them made it through security, they were told the session was already finished. The lawyer, Neri Rmata, filled them on what happened. The youths, whose ages range from 14 to 17, will spend 8-12 months in prison for throwing stones and similar light offenses. For three of the youths, it is not their first time in jail, and they will serve longer sentences. The court decided to release one of the boys, Ahmed Solaiby, on bail, but the decision was appealed. Court will resume on April 4th, and they will all remain in prison in the meantime. The expulsion of the eight boys from their town of Beit Ommar was not mentioned in court, and is not a possibility in their case. Several inaccurate reports have circulated around this case due to misunderstandings of the convoluted Israeli military court system and the understandable anxiety of the parents of these imprisoned children, but we will make every attempt to maintain an accurate account of the current status of their case on this website.

Friday is the 62nd day of the Palestinian prisoner’s protest against his detention by Israel.

Sixty-one days. That is how long it’s been since Khader Adnan has eaten.

The 33-year-old Palestinian was taken from his home in Arrabeh village near Jenin in the occupied West Bank at 3:30am on December 17. One day later he began his hunger strike to protest against the “humiliation and policy of administrative detention”. Adnan, like hundreds of other Palestinians, was arrested under a military order that Israel has named “administrative detention”, which allows prisoners to be held without charge or trial for periods of up to six months, spells that can be renewed indefinitely.

Sahar Francis is a lawyer with Addameer, a prisoner rights groups based in the West Bank city of Ramallah, and a member of Khader Adnan’s legal team. She visited the hunger striker in Ziv hospital in Safad, Israel, on Friday.

She described her client, who remains shackled to his hospital bed, as “mentally perfect, but physically very weak”.

Francis told Al Jazeera that Adnan was being given only glucose and other sugars through an intravenous drip, but refusing anything else that would be considered a breach of his protest. Doctors told Francis that he could suffer from a heart attack or from the failure of other internal organs and die at any moment.

Adnan’s family and legal team were hoping that he would be released this week when his case went before a military appeals court. However, the appeal was denied and the court ordered that Adnan must finish the four month administrative detention, set to end on May 8.

In response to Al Jazeera’s request for an interview, the Israeli military sent a statement that read:

“Khader Adnan was arrested with an administrative arrest warrant for activities that threaten regional security. This warrant was authorised by a judicial review.”

Francis and Adnan’s legal team argue that, after losing some 40kg from more than 60 days without food, Adnan is wheelchair-bound and too weak to pose a risk to anyone.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both called on the Israeli authorities either to release Adnan or immediately charge him with criminal offences and have him tried.

Prison knowledge

For Adnan, like many Palestinians in the occupied territories, incarceration is not an uncommon experience. According to Addameer, in January there were more than 4,400 Palestinian “political prisoners” in Israeli jails. Of them, 310 were being held under administrative detention.

Adnan, who in the past was convicted of being a spokesperson for the Islamic Jihad armed group, has, according to his family, been detained nine times since his first arrest as a student activist in 1999.

It was soon after his first imprisonment that he met Mousa Abu Maria in Ashkelon prison. Abu Maria, the same age as Adnan, explained to Al Jazeera how, for many, prison is like a “university”, where prisoners teach each other about global struggles and discuss how they relate to their own as Palestinians.

“The old prisoners tell the new prisoners about history of the past and when people make hunger strike[s] and how the situation changed,” he said.

The history lessons seem to spread quickly through the prisons.

“The first time that people start to talk about hunger strike, I started to hear from them about how they [could] start. Sometime[s] they started to talk room to room about hunger strike and the goal in going on hunger strike.”

The stories, Abu Maria said, “give you power and hope”.

One of the stories commonly told among Palestinians inside Israeli prisons is of the ten republican prisoners in Northern Ireland who died as a result of their hunger strike in 1981. Most famous among them was 27-year-old Provisional IRA member Bobby Sands, who was elected to the British parliament during his fast, and died after 66 days of refusing to eat. This, and other hunger strikes and organised actions, were believed to have improved prisoners’ conditions and made gains for their nationalist cause.

Since the rise of a Palestinian nationalist movement in the late 1960s and 1970s to combat Israeli occupation, hunger striking has been a common tactic among Palestinian prisoners that, according to Addameer’s Francis, has frequenty succeeded in improving the conditions of their incarceration.

Stories such as Sands’, Abu Maria said, “made us think that hunger strike is the only way a prisoner can resist”.

Abu Maria served almost five years of his prison sentence and was released in 2003. However, like Adnan, he faced ongoing harassment from Israeli officials. Abu Maria’s home and that of his family was later raided by Israeli soldiers, and he was eventually rearrested and placed under administrative detention in 2009.

Abu Maria told Al Jazeera that not knowing what the charges against him were – and when he would be released – made being jailed all the more difficult. He said the more than 14 months he spent under administration detention was “a really bad time in my life”.

“Now Khader is in a bad condition, and any time he can die,” Abu Maria said.

With protests in solidarity with Khader Adnan already happening both in the occupied territories and inside Israel, Abu Maria said there would be widespread rage if Adnan were to die.

“I believe, if he dies, the situation in Palestine will change very fast. We can have a third intifada ["uprising"].”

Few options left

With the military’s case against prisoners kept secret to both the defendant and legal teams, Addameer’s Francis said defending clients under administrative detention is incredibly difficult, if not impossible.

“You don’t have any tools to build a defence,” Francis said. “This is the most serious problem for any lawyer in administrative detention cases.”

She pointed out that, while administrative detention may be considered short-term, Addameer has documented cases showing prisoners kept in jail for up to six to eight years, with their detention renewed every six months.

In 2009, the UN committee against torture expressed concern with the “inordinately lengthy periods” that Israel gives prisoners and reported that it could constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

“Administrative detention thus deprives detainees of basic safeguards, including the right to challenge the evidence which is the basis for the detention, warrants are not required, and the detainee may be de facto in incommunicado detention for an extended period, subject to renewal.”

After a millitary court rejected Adnan’s appeal on Monday, Francis is hoping that Israel’s high court will agree to review his case, including its secret evidence, in the coming days – and make a decision to release him, by either cancelling his sentence or shortening it to the time he has already served. “This is the last channel [available to us] in the Israeli legal system,” Francis said.

Randa Adnan, Khader’s pregnant wife and the mother of the couple’s two young daughters, told the UK’s Independent on Thursday: “I know my husband. He will not change his mind. I expect him to die.”

With no media allowed access to prisoners, Adnan’s own words have only been available through a letter that he gave to one of his lawyers on a recent visit. The Ma’an news agency, based in the occupied West Bank, published parts of the letter translated into English:

“The Israeli occupation has gone to extremes against our people, especially prisoners. I have been humiliated, beaten, and harassed by interrogators for no reason, and thus I swore to God I would fight the policy of administrative detention to which I and hundreds of my fellow prisoners fell prey.”

“Here I am in a hospital bed surrounded with prison wardens, handcuffed, and my foot tied to the bed,” the letter continued. “The only thing I can do is offer my soul to God, as I believe righteousness and justice will eventually triumph over tyranny and oppression.”

Mousa Abu Maria spent nearly five years, from 1999 to 2003, in Israeli prisons. He spent an additional 14 months, from 2008 to 2009, in administrative detention (without charge or trial). He, like current hunger striker Khader Adnan, was subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment and torture as part of his interrogation. In 2001, he shared a cell with Adnan.

Abu Maria, a member of the popular committee in the West Bank village Beit Ommar and co-founder of the Palestine Solidarity Project, spoke to Bekah Wolf about Khader Adnan, who is being held by Israel without charge and has entered his 55th day of hunger strike.

Bekah Wolf: How do you know Khader Adnan?

Mousa Abu Maria: We met in 2001 or 2002 in Askelon prison. He was an organizer in the prison, because it wasn’t the first time he’d been in jail. He used to lead classes about Palestinian history and the uprising. Prison was like a university in those times and he was one of the professors.

BW: What was he like as a person?

MAM: Most [foreign] people think if you have a beard or you’re a member of Islamic Jihad, you just sit and pray all day. Khader would joke around, just like anyone else. He’s my age, we were young, we were like any other young people. He would try to make us feel like we weren’t in prison, like we were in a dorm room. He was always organizing the prisoners, which of course got him in trouble with the guards. He was often put in solitary confinement, but would come out and continue what he was doing before.

BW: He began his hunger strike to protest how he was treated during his interrogation. He was held in stress positions, beaten and insulted. Is that similar to what you experienced?

MAM: This is what the occupation forces do to activists. They try to show how they have control over you. They want to say, maybe you had power [as an organizer] outside, but in here [prison] we have complete control. They would force me to sit with my hands cuffed to my ankles, on a tiny chair that was tilted over so that I was in a crouching position for hours, day after day. It is both very painful and a psychological torture. You can’t lift your head, you can’t look them in the eye. They want you to feel that you do not own yourself, that they own you, and you do not have any power to resist.

BW: What about the beating and insults? What is the purpose?

MAM: Again, it is just to show control, to break your will to resist. They know you have been an activist and that you have internal strength to resist. They have to break that from you. Sometimes it’s to try to get information from you but many times it is just to break your will. That’s why you go on hunger strike. It is the only thing you can control: what you eat, what you put into your body. It is the way to show that you can still resist. You are showing your captors and your comrades, but you are also showing yourself, giving yourself strength that you are still resisting, that they haven’t taken everything away from you.

BW: Khader is now striking to protest being in administrative detention. You were in administrative detention for 14 months. Can you explain what it is and why it is inspiring a man to die rather than live under such conditions?

MAM: First of all, I do not believe Khader wants to die. That is not in his mind. We all went on hunger strikes before, to protest conditions of our imprisonment. He is showing his commitment to resistance in the only way he can right now, with his own body.

Administrative detention is also a psychological attack on a person. You are held, without knowing what you are accused of, but most importantly, without knowing when the imprisonment will end. When you are convicted, you can accept in your mind what is happening, and put it aside, and plan and hope for the day when you are released.

Administrative detention does not allow you to do that. Because you never know when you will be released, you are in constant turmoil. Your family is also in turmoil. You remember when I thought I was going to be released. The guards told me to pack my things, and I sent a message to you through another prisoner that I was being released. They even drove me to the gate of the prison, with all of my things, and I thought, after 12 months, I was being released, I would see my wife and family again.

And then they said it was a joke, and put me back into the jeep and brought me back to the prison. It destroys your soul. Your mind can only experience so much loss of power before you start to destroy yourself. It takes a huge amount of strength not to fall into despair. This is a powerful reason for Khader going on hunger strike. I believe he needs to feel that they [occupation forces] are not in full control of him. They can control when he sees his family, when he will be released, all of that — but he has control over something now, something they cannot take away from him. The goal of any occupation force is to demonstrate their total power over the people, so that they will not resist. Khader is showing himself, and all of us, that the power to resist is always in our hands. Occupation forces cannot take that away from us.

BW: Mousa, you were in jail for more than six years. You were beaten so badly during your interrogation for your first imprisonment that they had to take you to the hospital. You’ve had your house raided in the middle of the night several times, and any time you know they might take you away and put you in administrative detention again, even if you haven’t done anything. How do you continue working with the popular struggle? How do you keep resisting?

MAM: People like me, like Khader, like Bassem Tamimi [imprisoned organizer from Nabi Saleh], we made a commitment a long time ago to resist. We promised ourselves and our people that we would face the occupation and look it in the eye.

Of course, I do not want to go to prison again. I want to have a life with my wife and my daughter. We Palestinians are not robots, we are not living just to resist. We want to have a normal life, to laugh and joke and go to the park with our children. But we also want to keep our commitment to ourselves and our people: we will stand up to the occupation. We will not let them own us. Even if the only way to resist their control is to refuse them, to refuse their food, their water, their medical treatment, then that is what we will do. Khader Adnan is continuing the resistance to the very end. He is actually fighting for life, life with justice and dignity.

Bekah Wolf is a co-founder of the Palestine Solidarity Project, and has worked in the West Bank since 2003. She is married to Mousa Abu Maria.

TAKE ACTION NOW!

1.Call and demand the release of Khader Adnan, who has not been charged with any crime but instead is being held under Administrative Detention.
Call the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC (1.202.364.5500) OR your local Embassy (for a list, click here).

Call the office of Jeffrey Feltman, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs (1.202.647.7209)

Demand that Jeffrey Feltman bring this issue urgently to his counterparts in Israel and raise the question of Khader Adnan’s administrative detention.

2. Organize a protest outside your local Israeli Embassy (for a list, click here).

Post your local actions to the Khader Adnan facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Free-Khader-Adnan/236953309725144

Help us spread the word with social media after you take action.
Download this photo of Khader Adnan to use for your social media profile pictures and click on the suggested messages below and they will be automatically tweeted.

Tweet Now: Take Action Now for #KhaderAdnan http://samidoun.ca/?p=133 #Palestine #Israel

Tweet Now: I just called my local #Israel Embassy to demand #KhaderAdnan’s release. Join me now! ListofEmbassies: http://bit.ly/xoEzsS

Tweet Now: Sign Petition to #FreeKhader hunger-striking Palestinian prisoner http://samidoun.ca/?p=116 #palestine #KhaderAdnan

3. Other Actions

To contact the authorities within Israel, see Addameer’s appeal.
Other ideas for actions and a letter-writing template can be found on this action alert from Samidoun (The Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network).
See Amnesty International’s report and appeal to action.

Khader Adnan, the father of two daughters and with a third child on the way, is a baker, a Masters student in Economics at Birzeit University, and a political activist. Khader, was arrested on December 17, 2011 by masked soldiers who raided his home in the middle of the night (the village of Arrabe near Jenin in the occupied West Bank). Between the 18th and the 29th of January 2012, he was subjected to almost daily cruel and inhumane interrogations. During interrogations, he was shackled to a crooked chair with his hands tied behind his back in a position that caused him back pain. He said that interrogators threatened him constantly and verbally abused him and his family.

Khader was given a four-month administrative detention order on January 8, 2012. Khader’s interrogation period has ended but he refuses to accept the unjust system of administrative detention [more details], continuing his strike on the principle that such detention is a violation of his rights and identity. Administrative detention, a regular practice of the Israeli occupation, violates the internationally-recognized right to a fair trial. International standards for fair trial must be upheld for all political detainees, including those accused of violence, even under states of emergency. A military judge reviewed the administrative detention order on February 1, 2012 and is expected to inform lawyers of her decision later on this week.

Meanwhile, Khader’s health is deteriorating rapidly and doctors don’t expect him to be able to survive for much longer.

Last year, over 300 Palestinian, international, and Israeli women attended the first conference in Beit Ommar. Please consider donating towards the cost of this conference and supporting women organizing against the occupation. Links to the Center’s Paypal account can be found below:
http://www.center4freedom.org/support/

The following is the full invitation from the Center for Freedom and Justice:

The Second Conference of Palestinian and Israeli Women

To mark the
101st International Women’s Day

This is the second year that we, Palestinian and Israeli women, do not obey the unlawful and immoral apartheid laws imposed by the Israeli Occupation Governments on the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Our conference aims to preserve, maintain, and reinforce the Palestinians human rights under occupation.

This year we will again come together for a day of discussion and shared experiences. We will be presenting different viewpoints of our joint civil disobedience activities as part of the ongoing non violent popular resistance against the occupation.

We invite everyone who sees herself as a partner in our cause to attend the conference, and to play a part in the firm political covenant between us that we continue to maintain despite all those who wish to destroy it.

Saturday 10 March 2012
10:00 a.m. start – ends at 16:00 p.m
There will be full simultaneous translation – Arabic, Hebrew, and English during all discussions. A vegetarian lunch will be available.
The full program will be published and distributed closer to the date.

We look forward to see you there!

For more information, please contact:
center4freedom@gmail.com