Ex-Palestinian hunger striker could be jailed again: Amnesty

The London-based rights body reported on Friday that a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan on the 31-year-old lawyer, who came out of a coma earlier in the week, exposed extensive damage to Allan’s brain that had been caused by vitamin deficiency, the Ma’an news agency reported.
 
The rights group warned that the damage could leave the Palestinian man in critical condition.
 
Amnesty added that despite Thursday’s decision by the Israeli High Court to suspend Allan’s administrative detention because of his poor health, his detention could be re-imposed under the court ruling passed on him.
 
The Israeli High Court has ruled that if no improvement showed in Allan’s neurological damage, the detention order will be revoked entirely.
 
Allan ended his hunger strike on Thursday. He had been on hunger strike for 65 days to protest Israel’s practice of holding suspects indefinitely, without charge or trial, in a practice known as administrative detention. Rights groups say the overused measure violates international law.
 
Palestinians inmates regularly go on hunger strike in protest at both the unfair administrative detention policy as well as the harsh prison conditions in Israeli jails.
 
More than 7,000 Palestinians are reportedly incarcerated in 17 Israeli prisons and detention centers, many of them without charge or trial.
 
Israel also recently passed a bill allowing the force-feeding of hunger-striking prisoners. Critics of force-feeding, however, see it as not only a means of torture, but also an unethical violation of the subject’s autonomy.