Hunger strikers hospitalised as Trump visits
SEVENTY Palestinian political prisoners have been rushed to Israeli hospitals as their health continued to deteriorate on the 37th day of a mass hunger-strike over prison conditions.
Simultaneously, as US President Donald Trump visited Israel and East Jerusalem, which is in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, violence and clashes between protesting Palestinians and Israeli security forces raged across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian Red Crescent reported more than 100 Palestinians injured, at least 20 of whom were shot with either live ammunition or rubber-coated steel bullets.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas welcomed Trump at the Palestinian presidential palace in the southern occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem yesterday.
Abbas and Trump held a brief joint media conference following a closed-door meeting, before Trump left Bethlehem ahead of a planned visit to the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Trump said “peace is a choice we must make each day, and the US is here to make that dream possible for young Jewish, Muslim and Christian children”, presumably referring to children in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.
According to Israeli and Palestinian media reports, and the prisoners’ media committee, the Israeli authorities moved the hunger-striking prisoners from prison field clinics to civilian hospitals on Monday.
The prisoners’ media committee said that Israel Prison Services officials in southern Israel’s Ashkelon prison had moved all hunger-striking prisoners to the prison’s field clinic.
A lawyer who visited several of the prisoners said they were showing dangerous symptoms including losing consciousness repeatedly, nausea, vomiting, severe head and limb pain, low heart rates, and weight loss of at least 15kg.
A number of the prisoners have also stopped drinking water while others are subsisting on salt and water only.
Some 1 300 hunger-striking prisoners are calling for an end to the denial of family visits, the right to pursue higher education, appropriate medical care and treatment, an end to solitary confinement and imprisonment without charge or trial – among other basic rights demands.
After his meeting with Trump, Abbas pledged to co-operate with the US leader to reach a historic peace deal with Israelis.
“Our problem is with the occupation and settlements and the failure of Israel to recognise the state of Palestine in the same way we recognise (Israel),” Abbas said.
“The problem is not between us and Judaism, it is between us and occupation.”
He also urged Israel to comply with the “just and human demands” of hundreds of the Palestinian hunger strikers. – ANA and Ma’an