Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1998, Pages 9, 18

Special Report

Female Palestinian Political Prisoner Uses Hunger Strike to Protest and Publicize Israeli Injustices

By Maureen Meehan

On Nov. 30, Palestinian political prisoner Etaf Elayan ended a 40-day hunger strike in an Israeli jail where she is the only female administrative detainee among over 500 males, all of whom are being held without trial or charge.

Etaf began her hunger strike immediately after she was informed of her status as a detainee, within two days after Israeli soldiers took her off a bus near Bethlehem. The bus was headed to a rally in support of the 500 detainees and 4,000 convicted Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and prisons. One witness said it was clear the Israeli soldiers had one goal in stopping the bus that was traveling on a winding West Bank road: to arrest Etaf Elayan. "They knew just when and where to find her; they walked right up to her seat and took her off."

Etaf, a 38-year-old resident of Bethlehem, is as familiar with them as they are with her. No stranger to Israeli prisons, Etaf has spent the last decade incarcerated in them.

As reported in the April/May 1997 Washington Report, she was released in February 1997 after having served 10 years, four of them in solitary confinement. Etaf had participated in a prison protest in which she and 29 other Palestinian women refused an Israeli pardon and release unless all female prisoners were included, as stipulated in the Oslo accords. At the time, Israel had singled out five women whom they refused to set free because of the nature of their convictions. The protest lasted 16 months, during which time the women often found it necessary to barricade themselves into their cells.

That caliber of determination and solidarity remains a thorn in the side of the Israeli government and intelligence agencies. Now Etaf is the only administrative detainee to have immediately embarked on and maintained such a lengthy hunger strike to protest the illegality of detention without charge or trial, which has been a principal means of Israeli control in the occupied territories.

"She refuses to accept the illegal process," Tamar Pelleg, Etaf's attorney, told the Washington Report just after her client announced she would suspend her strike. "As soon as she was told she would be held without charge or trial, she declared a total hunger strike."

Etaf's decision should not have come as a surprise to those who know her or her history. In 1993, she fasted for 43 days to demand that her Israeli jailers release her from solitary confinement.

"When she was in prison, the Israelis didn't want her mixing with the other prisoners and now they don't want her mixing with the rest of Palestinian society," said an activist from Bethlehem who spent a year in detention in 1994 and 1995. "They think anyone as strong as her must be dangerous."

Tamar Pelleg pointed out that administrative detention is a violation of international law, something that Israel consistently ignores with impunity in the name of national security. The Israeli lawyer said her hope is that Etaf's hunger strike has focused attention on the illegality and widespread Israeli use of detention as a tool against Palestinian political activism.

Although Etaf's hunger strike demand was that she be released or tried immediately, observers say she is not likely to be released until January and that her family and husband, a political prisoner in Israel whom she married while in prison in 1994, urged her to end the strike before the physical effects became irreversible.

Following her decision to end the hunger strike, Etaf told Pelleg she was sure her detention order would not be renewed and that she "may be getting out soon." It is believed that some kind of an arrangement was worked out in order for Israel to avoid admitting that again it has tried and failed to break the will of a Palestinian female political prisoner.

Etaf's hunger strike was one of the longest to have been carried out by a Palestinian in an Israeli jail. "She's really a phenomenon; after 40 days of consuming nothing but water, she sat up straight in her chair and negotiated, in Hebrew, with her Israeli jailers," said Pelleg, who added that three representatives in charge of prisoners' issues from the Palestinian Authority also witnessed the negotiations. "But Etaf does her own talking."

In recent weeks, there have been numerous protests throughout the West Bank in support of Etaf, many of which were broken up by Israeli troops using tear gas and plastic bullets.

"We could do with more people like her," said Ahmed, a waiter in a hotel in Bethlehem, where clashes were the worst and where 50 Palestinians were injured during the last weekend of November. "People respect and admire her because she drew some attention to a really frightening practice that no one seems to know or care much about."

During interviews following her release last February, Etaf spoke passionately of Israel's use of administrative detention as a way to round up political leaders and activists from all sectors of Palestinian society.

"Detention without trial is Israel's way of keeping the real and potential political leaders off the street," Etaf said. "The state of affairs among the Palestinian leadership, in addition to the growing powerlessness and indifference, enables Israel to pick off any possible leader, activist, and every perceived 'troublemaker' who sticks his or her head up too high."

She said the Palestinian Authority has been very lax in applying pressure on Israel regarding the practice of administrative detention. Indeed, the plight of the detainees has been roundly ignored by not only the Palestinian leadership but the world press and international community as well.

Recently two members of the Swedish-based International Commission of Jurists visited Jerusalem to observe the Military Appeals Committee, which was to hear the cases of Ahmed Qattamesh, detained for four-and-a-half years, and Khaled Deleisheh, detained for 60 months and now serving his seventh consecutive detention order. The appeals are the first to have been heard for over a year since the detainees declared a boycott against the process, arguing that it is inherently unjust as their detention orders are renewed on the basis of secret evidence which is not available to the detainees' attorneys.

Most detention orders are issued for six months and are very often renewed for an additional six-month period.

Arab Israeli attorneys recently visited several prisons where Palestinians are being held and reported that living and health conditions have worsened considerably. In Nafha prison serious clashes between guards and prisoners occurred during mid-November. Prisoners who were injured in those clashes were denied medical attention and 20 other prisoners were placed in isolation, according to the lawyers' report.

Meanwhile, Israel's largest daily newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, quoted judicial sources confirming that an Israeli ministerial committee, headed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, met on Nov. 28 and decided to extend the permit for Israeli security forces to use torture while interrogating Palestinians.