30 Palestinian detainees continue hunger strike for 11th day

Thirty Palestinians in the Israeli jails continue their collective hunger strike for the 11th day in a row, protesting the Israeli policy of administrative detention, by which Israeli forces detain Palestinians indefinitely without trial.
 
The strike began in late September after a significant rise in the number of administrative detention orders against Palestinians in recent months.
 
According to the Palestinian Prisoners' Club, Israeli authorities issued more than 1,500 detention orders since the beginning of 2022, 272 in August alone.
 
"Negotiations between hunger strikers and the Israeli jail authority haven't advanced," a source at Addameer Prisoners' support association told The New Arab.
 
"The strikers are protesting the administrative detention as a whole, and at the very least, they seek to stop the use of administrative detention on a large scale as a tool to imprison any Palestinian without reason," the source said.
 
"The health condition of all hunger strikers has begun to deteriorate, and all of them lost at least one kilogram of weight, while some have begun to feel headache and various forms of pain," the source added.

30 Palestinian prisoners are on their 9th day of hunger strike, rejecting their administrative detention without charge or trial inside Israeli jails, and demanding “Fresh air, a sky without prison bars, and a space of freedom". #FreeThemAll pic.twitter.com/D8ThMf6VMY

— PALESTINE ONLINE 🇵🇸 (@OnlinePalEng) October 3, 2022

According to Palestinian sources, all hunger strikers have gone through medical exams in the past days, except for Palestinian-French lawyer Salah Hamouri.
 
Hamouri has been detained since March under an administrative detention order. According to human rights sources, he refused to take medical exams since the beginning of the hunger strike as an additional form of protest.
 
Out of the 30 Palestinian inmates taking part in the hunger strike, 26 are administrative detainees themselves, while six are serving fixed sentences and joined the strike in solidarity with the administrative detainees. One of the six is 25-year-old Haitham Syaj, who is facing charges of activism.

 
"We saw Haitham last Sunday at his court hearing and could only exchange a few words with him," his mother told The New Arab. "He looked physically tired, his face was pale, but he smiled all the time and told us that the morale of all the hunger strikers was very high." 
 
"As a family, we have been living in anguish since the strike began," said the mother. "Our only hope is that the strike will not be prolonged." 
 
"We learned from the lawyer that my father has lost weight and that his morale is high," the daughter of Guevara Taha, one of the administrative detainees on hunger strike and a father of three, told The New Arab.
 
"Our life paused eleven days ago," she said, "we can not think of anything or do anything, as we are expecting any news at any moment."
 
Meanwhile, Palestinians marched and held vigils in Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron in support of the hunger strike.

 
On Tuesday afternoon, the Palestinian Prisoners' Club announced that around 900 Palestinian prisoners plan to stage a one-day hunger strike in support of the ongoing hunger strike by the 30 detainees on Wednesday.
 
743 Palestinians are held in Israeli jails without charges under the administrative detention system, according to Palestinian human rights groups.