Recently freed Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan expressed appreciation Tuesday for the role Egypt played in securing his release from an Israeli prison.
Israel released Adnan on 17 April after a 66-day hunger strike against what he said was mistreatment by Israeli authorities during interrogations.
“I’d like to thank Egypt for the efforts it made to get me released,” state-run news agency MENA quoted Adnan as saying in a press conference at the Palestinian Information Ministry in Ramallah Tuesday.
“I’d also like to thank Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who always supports Palestinian prisoners,” he added.
Adnan said Yasser Othman, Egypt’s ambassador to the Palestinian Authority, congratulated him after his release and expressed Egypt’s support for his case, as well as those of all Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons.
He also praised other Palestinian prisoners who have been on hunger strike for eight days to demand better prison conditions, the ability for their families to visit them and no strip searches for family members during the visits, the website of the Palestinian daily Alquds reported.
Adnan said the planning of such strikes is not a new idea and that they have been carried out several times, the last of which was in 2004.
Adnan was referring to the mass hunger strike conducted by about 1,600 Palestinian prisoners in August 2004 to protest the bad conditions in Israeli jails.
However, Adnan said this month’s mass hunger strike, in which about 1,500 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli detention began a hunger strike, achieved nothing, meaning the conditions in which Palestinian prisoners are being held by the Israeli authorities didn’t change.
On Monday, an Israeli military court rejected appeals by families of Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahla, two Palestinian prisoners who have been refusing food for 55 days, to be released.
Diab, 27, and Halahla, 34, are being held in an Israeli prsion without charge under a procedure known as administrative detention, which means they can be held for renewable periods of up to six months.
The released prisoner said he considered pushing prisoners to strike an international moral scandal of the Israeli occupation, Alquds quoted him as saying.
“The occupation [Israel] dubs itself as an oasis of democracy,” Adnan said, “while in reality, it’s a dark hole that harms all of the Middle East and the [Palestinian] prisoners in the first place.”
