Khader Adnan’s life is in peril as his hunger strike inside Israeli prison surpasses 80 days
Children of Khader Adnan at a sit-in for their father on hunger strike
Mariam Barghouti reports in Mondoweiss:
On April 24, Palestinian hunger-striker and political activist Khader Adnan, 44, fainted on camera during his military court hearing.
“The few words he could say during the hearing were ‘I want to speak with Randa,’ but immediately after that the video conference was cut off and the screen turned black,” 41-year-old Randa Moussa, Adnan’s wife, told Mondoweiss.
For almost 81 days, Khader Adnan has been on hunger strike, protesting his political detention by Israel. Despite medical concerns for his life, Adnan continues to be held in Ramleh prison hospital.
“I am afraid this time,” Moussa said as she reflected on her husband’s condition. “This time is not like the other times, this time he is feeling the toll that all the previous hunger strikes have had on him.”
On the eve of the Eid al-Fitr holiday on April 21, Moussa hauled herself and Adnan’s nine children from Arrabah, 12 kilometers southwest of Jenin, and brought them to Ramallah, almost 140 kilometers away. “When we came here, it was a painful feeling,” Moussa explained as she sat on a plastic chair at a rally for Adnan in the middle of downtown Ramallah, a few kilometers away from the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters. “We did not wake up at dawn to simply sit here on the sidewalk,” she explained to Mondoweiss. “We’re here for the purpose of sending a message,” she said.
A dozen arrests and three hunger strikes later
Sheikh Khader Adnan is from the town of Arrabah in the Jenin district. He and his wife, Randa, have nine children. The youngest, Zainab, is a year and a half, while the eldest, Maali, is 14. Adnan is publicly affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the militant political group formed by Palestinian students in the 1980s in Egypt.