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April 21st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda About 1,600 Palestinian prisoners have begun an open-ended hunger strike in the Israeli jails across the occupied territories to protest at imprisonment without charge and solitary confinement exercised by the Tel Aviv regime.
According to an April 1, 2012 report published by the non-governmental Palestinian prisoner support and human rights association, Addameer, at least 4,610 “political” Palestinian prisoners are held in Israeli jails.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Khaled Almudallal, operations coordinator for UFree, to share his opinion on this issue. The following is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: What we just heard there from Dr. Umar [the other guest of the program] psychological torture, trying to isolate the prisoners to the point where they break down, totally misrepresenting the facts to make a legal case or in this case a military one, it feels wrong, it is wrong. Why is the international community not doing more to highlight this?
Almudallal: Dr. Abdulaziz mentioned a very important point. The Israeli military are using all means of psychological torture against Palestinian prisoners. He was saying repeatedly that they were attacking his brain, his mind.
Press TV: As he is a noted intellectual.
Almudallal: Yes he is a specialist doctor in English literature and for a Palestinian to be known in that field, that wasn’t making them happy basically.
And we received repeated reports about the Palestinians being psychologically tortured and being put under all sorts of circumstances starting from solitary confinement, keeping them in a cell without basic needs. He was saying clothing weren’t provided to him, therefore he was put in sometimes underwear or sometimes he was put without clothing at all.
And I think these are one of the very few ways that we can really mention Abdulaziz has got a lot to bring out to the people and to tell them what was happening exactly inside his prisons and torture.
Press TV: So what is UFree trying to do to highlight this?
Almudallal: UFree were in Gaza two weeks ago. We held the first international seminar on the rights of Palestinian political prisoners and detainees. We had Dr. Abdulaziz speaking there, giving his testimony about his experience in Israeli jails.
We work on promoting and educating the world and in particular in Europe about Palestinian prisoners and what they go through and they are tortured and being detained specially women and children.
Press TV: The argument would be that somebody breaks the law then they deserve to be locked up. What is so different about this scenario when it comes to Palestinian prisoners?
Almudallal: I think international law would agree that arresting the Palestinians in the way that the Israelis are doing, putting them under the administrative detention without trial for months and years, putting them in solitary confinement without being trialed, this is completely against international law.
We try to expose on these issues, we try to bring justice out to the Palestinians as well as educating the world about what is happening to the Palestinians of unjust and torture, detention and that is continuous on the daily basis of the Palestinian lives.
Press TV: When we saw Yousef al-Helou’s package there earlier, he talked about April the 17th the beginning of a mass hunger strike within the prison movement, within Palestinian prisoners who were saying enough is enough, this is the only method we have to protest, to draw attention to what is going on.
First of all, your reaction to hunger strike as a method of highlighting the situation and is it effective?
Almudallal: Hunger strike was definitely effective when Khader Adnan started his hunger strike for 66 days. He inspired many Palestinian prisoners.
The second one was Hana Shalabi who spent 43 days in hunger strike and she was the longest serving female hunger striker in the world.
It was very effective and Israel would need to react to that so quickly. They need to lift all the sanctions on Palestinian prisoners. They need to give them more rights, they need to seek education, health treatment, be able to read more, be able to communicate and have family visits specially.
17th of April was a remarkable day. The day of Palestinian prisoners was the day that over 1,700 Palestinian prisoners and detainees inside Israeli jails have started the open-ended hunger strike which would remark the all ways of torture that Israelis are practicing on Palestinian prisoners. I hope that this hunger strike would be successful.
Press TV: Yes that is what I have been asking you, will it work?
Almudallal: It will definitely work. I think the international community is waiting to know more about Palestinian prisoners. Hunger strike was definitely a very effective tool where the Palestinians can easily bring out to the world; the world has now understood far better than before about the case of Palestinian prisoners.
UFree is dedicated to support Palestinian prisoners and to educate everybody about the situation and to run number of campaigns to support hunger strikers as well as ending the illegal administrative detention of the Palestinians.
Press TV: Very disturbing hearing some of those statistics.
Almudallal: Definitely. I mean Ufree, we noted that over 300 Palestinian children were under 18 years old, many of them were under 16 even have been detained till this moment by Israel.
Many of them have been detained without charge and it is very disturbing for the international community to find out that at least 300 Palestinian prisoners-I would call them prisoners and detainees- are inside Israeli jails at this moment.
UFree is very dedicated to work on those children to be able to bring their suffering out to the world. It is illegal to detain those children and many of them are the ones who are from Jerusalem, West Bank and they have been detained in situations where they were crossing a checkpoint or they were visiting their parents in prison, their loved ones.
They were even throwing stones at checkpoints and were detained, most of them, for unjustifiable reasons by Israel and UFree is working with a number of international NGOs to highlight the issue of Palestinian prisoners, children prisoners and to kind of seek more support from the governments, from the NGOs to really end the detention and illegal detention of Palestinian children.
Press TV: Cause it must be terrifying. Sometimes you are taken in the night, you are taken sometimes by people who are not speaking the same language as you are, you are not sure where your legal guardian might be, nobody comes to visit you if ever but for very long time. I mean it must be incredibly traumatic.
Almudallal: Definitely. I think two months ago a video was recorded in a torture center in Jerusalem where a child was kidnapped from his own home from Jerusalem and was put in a center way he was questioned for over twelve hours.
And that video did show the reality of the Israeli interrogator, how they treat Palestinian children and therefore that would tell us how they do treat the other Palestinians and it is not only arresting Palestinian children.
Palestinian children generally are suffering through the experience. If they have a father who is in prison or a brother, they are unable; they are not allowed to visit them for so-called security reasons.
They sometimes have to get up very early in the morning to be able to go and visit their loved ones inside Israeli jails for sometimes a twelve-hour journey to see them for only 10 or 20 minutes.
This is very astonishing facts that we know about but we would like to highlight more on this issue.
Press TV: There is another seminar coming up. What are your guys doing next?
Almudallal: Jerusalem is next where UFree is organizing another international seminar to discuss the situation of the Palestinian political prisoners and detainees in Jerusalem and inside Israel, where we will highlight for the first time the situation of Palestinians, Israeli Arabs who have been detained for political reasons and those who are from Jerusalem and in specifically the Palestinian member of parliaments and many of them were from Jerusalem who have been kidnapped from the Red Cross tent that had for over a year.
They were kidnapped and put under administrative detention until this moment without any trial charge.
AHK/PKH
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