GAZA CITY, 16 August 2004 — Palestinian prisoners yesterday began an open-ended hunger strike to protest mistreatment and denial of their rights by Israeli authorities.

Israel’s Security Minister said he did not care if they starved to death.

The prisoners, seen by Palestinians as symbols of resistance to Israeli occupation, want wardens to stop strip searches, allow more frequent visits from their families, improve sanitary conditions and install public telephones, supporters said. More than 7,500 Palestinians are imprisoned in Israel.

“We declare, in the name of God, our national decision to launch an open-ended hunger strike,” the Palestinian Prisoners Society said in a statement, accusing Israel of “robbing us of all our rights, treading on our dignity and treating us like animals.”

The Israel Prisons Authority and Palestinian spokesmen said striking prisoners declared they would live only on fluids until their demands are met.

Internal Security Minister Tzahi Hanegbi said Israel would not bow to pressure.

“As far as I’m concerned they can strike for a day, a month, until death. We will ward off this strike and it will be as if it never happened,” he told reporters.

Palestinian Minister for Detainees and Prisoner Affairs Hisham Abdel Razeq said the prisoners vowed not to break the strike until the Israeli prison authorities agreed to their demands. He called Hanegbi’s remarks “irrational and aimed to break down the resolve of our prisoners. The commencement of this step proves that his remarks have not served their purposes.” He dismissed Hanegbi’s charge that the prisoners’ demands were politically motivated. Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei warned there could be no solution to the Middle East conflict while thousands remained behind Israeli bars.

Ofer Lefler, a Prisons Authority spokesman, said privileges such as cigarettes, sweets and television were taken away from the prisoners after they began the strike, which he described as a “disturbance”.

He said if a prisoner became too emaciated “an ethical committee” would decide whether to begin force feeding.

Israeli officials said they feared closer contact with the outside world through more visits and phone calls would enable prisoners to help militants at large plan attacks on Israelis.

Issa Qaraqe, a prisoner rights activist in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, said the strike would spread from Israel’s main prisons to detention camps in military bases.

Some 200 people in Bethlehem marched in support of the prisoners. A similar demonstration was held by prisoners’ children in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.

In Lebanon, a support group for the last-remaining Lebanese prisoner in Israel, Samir Al-Qantar, began a hunger strike in solidarity and demanded an international investigation into alleged abuses in Israeli jails.

“However hard it is for us, it’s even harder for them,” Qantar’s sister Samira said, sitting in a stifling tent pitched for hunger-strikers outside Beirut’s UN headquarters.

Qantar was sentenced to 542 years in jail for his role in a 1979 raid in northern Israel that killed a four-year-old girl, her father and a policeman. Last January, Israel swapped about 400 prisoners for an Israeli civilian and the bodies of three soldiers under a deal with the Lebanese Hezbollah group.

— Additional input from agencies