JENIN, (The Palestine Information Centre)Senior Islamic Jihad official Maher al-Akhras started an open-ended hunger strike on Wednesday after the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) kidnaped him from his home in Silat ad-Dhaher town in Jenin, north of the West Bank.
His family announced that he immediately launched a hunger strike upon his arrest to demand his immediate release.
His wife, Taghreed al-Akhras, said that Israeli forces stormed their house in Silat ad-Dhaher town at three o’clock in the morning, bundled her and other members of the family into one room and detained farmers working for them on their agricultural land before kidnaping her husband.
She expressed her deep concern over her husband’s life, especially after senior Islamic Jihad official Khader Adnan died last May during his hunger strike in an Israeli jail.
Akhras is the father of six children. His last hunger strike in 2020, which continued for 103 days, drew widespread local and international solidarity.
In another incident, the Palestinian Commission of Detainees’ and Ex-Detainees’ Affairs released today information about the violent Israeli crackdown on Palestinian prisoners that happened recently in Ashkelon jail.
“At about 5:30 a.m., riot soldiers from different units stormed savagely and provocatively our section in Ashkelon, handcuffed us, and then transferred us en masse on a prison bus to Nafha jail. They did not allow us to take anything of our essential belongings, including clothes and blankets, with us,” a prisoner told visiting lawyer Youssef Matiya from the Commission of Detainees.
“One week later, after some prisoners returned to Ashkelon jail to take their belongings, they were surprised to see that everything in their cells had been barbarically destroyed and vandalized,” the prisoner said.
In response, a number of prisoners took protest steps and demanded the Ashkelon prison administration to compensate them for the damage that had occurred to their belongings, the commission’s lawyer reported.
One of the prisoners in the jail, Hatem as-Saghli, has been on hunger strike for about a week in protest at his exposure to harsh incarceration conditions, the lawyer said
