The Palestinian Authority preventive security service continues to detain six men in a Hebron jail in defiance of an order for their release. One of the detainees has been on hunger strike for six days in protest of his arrest, Ma’an reported.
Hamza Zablah, a member of Hamas, announced his hunger strike an hour after his detention by PA security Tuesday. Zablah’s wife Dania Qawasmeh posted on Facebook last Wednesday that her husband had been “kidnapped” by the “so-called preventative security services” being summoned for questioning. She declared: “No to political detentions. No to security coordination.”
The Hamas official website on Sunday morning called Zablah a “political prisoner.”
A representative of Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer told Ma’an on Monday that Zablah was one of six Arabs being held in the Hebron prison, adding that release orders had been issued for each one of them, which the security forces chose to defy.
Hamas has been accusing the PA of shipping Hamas-affiliated security prisoners from PA jails into Israeli prisons. The process, according to Addameer, is managed by the PA public prosecution.
Last year, six prisoners in a PA jail staged a hunger strike from August 28 and September 6, also to protest their unlawful detention. Hamas was later outraged when one of the hunger strikers, Basel al-Araj, was killed by the IDF which had been told when he would be released by PA security.