After more than nine weeks on hunger strike, Khader Adnan has become the Palestinian prisoner with by far the longest record of refusing food, Palestinian officials say.
A baker by trade, Adnan has been on hunger strike since December 18, a day after he was arrested near his home in a village near the northern town of Jenin. Tuesday marked the 66th day of the protest.
The strike, he says, is a protest against his being held without charge under a procedure known as "administrative detention" and against his mistreatment at the hands of the Israeli authorities.
Because of deteriorating health, the 34-year-old prisoner, a political activist with the radical Islamic Jihad movement, has been transferred to a hospital in northern Israel.
But doctors have warned he faces certain death if he continues much longer.
"A fast in excess of 70 days does not permit survival," Physicians for Human Rights-Israel said after one of its doctors examined him last week.
"Adnan has set an unprecedented record among Palestinian prisoners with his hunger strike," said Abdel Nasser Farawneh, an official with the Palestinian ministry for prisoner affairs.
Until now, the Palestinian record for going without food was set in 1976 when a group of prisoners ate nothing for 45 days. After a short break of several days, they then fasted for another 20 days.
Farawneh, who heads the ministry's statistics department, keeps records of the prisoners who have died while on hunger strike.
The first was Abdul Kader Abu al-Fahem who died in Ashkelon prison in 1970 after refusing food for nearly 20 days.
A decade later, four prisoners began a hunger strike in Nafha prison, near the southern desert town of Mitzpe Ramon.
Three of them, Rasem Halaweh, Anis Dawleh and Ali al-Jaafari, died after more than four weeks of refusing food.
The fourth prisoner, Ishaq Maraha, survived 32 days without food but died in 1983 from complications brought on by the lengthy strike, ministry statistics show.
The last Palestinian prisoner to die while on hunger strike in an Israeli prison was Hussein Ibeidat, in 1992, after 15 days without food.
"Khader Adnan is the longest and he is still alive. We hope he will stay alive," Farawneh told AFP.
Ministry documents show Adnan is no stranger to hunger strikes. He has been arrested nine times since 1998, and has routinely refused food to protest his arrest.
He was arrested in February 2000 on charges of encouraging students at Bir Zeit University to throw stones at visiting French prime minister at the time, Lionel Jospin.
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