Longest-Sentenced Palestinian Prisoner Begins Open Hunger Strike in Occupation Prisons

Jerusalem, MINA – The prisoner engineer Abdullah Al-Barghouthi, who is sentenced to 67 life terms in the occupation prisons, began a hunger strike, in response to his isolation by the occupation prisons administration and the ban on visits to him.

His daughter, Safaa, said on Twitter, “My father started the battle of empty intestines for the fourth consecutive day in response to the arrogance of the prison administration, which isolated him and prevented us from visiting him after we obtained a permit after several years of banning.”

Last March, the prisoner Abdullah Al-Barghouthi entered his 20th year inside the prisons of the Israeli occupation after he was arrested by Israeli special forces in the city of Al-Bireh in the middle of the occupied West Bank, on March 15, 2003.

Al-Barghouthi is considered one of the most dangerous Palestinian resistance fighters to the Israeli occupation during the second Palestinian intifada, which began on September 28, 2000, as he revived the armed wing of Hamas in the occupied West Bank, after the occupation assassinated its leader, Yahya Ayyash in 1996.

Al-Barghouti was born in Kuwait in 1972, moved to live in Jordan after the second Gulf War in 1990, and held Jordanian citizenship, before joining a South Korean university to study electronic engineering for 3 years, and it was a reason for him to learn the manufacture of explosives, but he did not complete his studies because of obtaining an entry permit to Palestine.

He entered Palestine for the first time in 1997 and worked in the city of Jerusalem in the maintenance of electronic devices, and then in 1998 he married his relative in the town of Beit Rima, northwest of Ramallah, and had three children, Tala, Osama, and Safaa, although he has not obtained a Palestinian identity until today.

He joined the armed resistance against the occupation, with the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, and became the engineer of guerrilla operations in Palestine, and was arrested for a month by the Palestinian Preventive Security Service, after carrying out the first operation in the Sbarro restaurant in Tel Aviv in August 2001, in which 15 Israelis were killed, and dozens of others were wounded.

“If Israel had to leave its land for any reason, it would take Abdullah al-Barghouti with it”; This is what the Israeli officer in charge of the file of the prisoner Barghouti said, after a military trial in which he was sentenced to 67 life imprisonment and 5,200 years, on charges of carrying out 7 operations that killed 67 Israelis and wounded more than 500 others. (LKG/RE1)

Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)