RAMALLAH, 27 August 2004 — It is in the Palestinians’ interest to use nonviolent methods in their struggle against Israel, the grandson of India’s pacifist independence leader Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi said here yesterday. “We are here to learn about the problems and also to talk about nonviolence and hopefully explain to people that nonviolence may be a possibility,” Arun Gandhi said after an hourlong meeting with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

Arun said that if the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, which broke out in September 2000, had been a nonviolent struggle from the start “perhaps the problem could have been solved”. Since the outbreak of fighting, statistics compiled by AFP show 4,247 people have been killed, including 3,249 Palestinians and 927 Israelis.

“If the Palestinian people rose up and started a nonviolent movement, it would step up world sympathy and the nations of the world would get up and put more pressure on the Israelis,” he said.

“I know your day of freedom is very near,” he told a crowd of thousands of flag-waving Palestinians in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “Insist on your rights and demand your freedom peacefully... Let the voice of reason and compassion stand up again,” said Arun, president and founder of the US-based M.K. Gandhi Institute for Non-Violence.

Following his meeting with the veteran Palestinian leader, Arun took part in a solidarity rally for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails who are in the 12th day of a hunger strike demanding an improvement in their conditions.

As a show of solidarity with the hunger strikers, Arun said that he and the members of his entourage would observe a one-day fast today. He is due to meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei today and take part in a mass demonstration against the wall Israel is building in the West Bank.

Palestinians at the rally, though they gave Arun rounds of applause, were split on the idea of nonviolence. “The peaceful resistance he talks about is better than what we have here,” said rally-goer Mohammed Saber, 25. “We should be a symbol of peace to the world. In the end we are with Arun. We need to be better than them.”

“We want peace. We want to live as they live. Isn’t this our right?” said Salima Ayat, holding a framed picture of her jailed son. “We want peace by any means.”

But others, like 15-year-old Mahmoud Suleiman, said they doubted nonviolence could win Palestinians a state, even as they welcomed Arun. “It won’t work,” he said. “There must be both armed and peaceful resistance, and armed resistance is more important.”

Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons appealed yesterday for international intervention to prevent their hunger strike developing into a “humanitarian disaster” as Israeli rights groups also condemned their treatment.

“We ask human rights organizations all around the world, and especially the UN, represented by its Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to take a stand an help us end the miserable circumstances we are living,” a spokesman for prisoners at a military-run detention center in the southern Negev desert told AFP by telephone.

“We ask you to assume the legal and ethical responsibility by taking a quick and effective action to prevent a humanitarian disaster,” added the prisoner, who would only give his name as Rami, reading from a statement in English.

Around half of the 8,000 Palestinians currently being held in Israeli prisons are observing an open-ended hunger strike which is now in its 12th day. The prisoners are hoping their protest will lead to an across-the-board improvement in their conditions, including statutory visiting rights and an end to what they see as “humiliating” body and cell searches.

“The unbearable treatment had pushed us to go on this hunger strike after all our tries to obtain a change had failed and the prisons’ administration had refused to respond to our simple needs as human beings,” Rami said.

“We ask the Israelis to respect our dignity, improve our conditions and allow family visits, stop the naked searching policy, the solitary confinement policy for a huge number of prisoners, improve the food quality and quantity and improve health care”.

Arafat’s top adviser, Nabil Abu Rudeina, also urged the United Nations and human rights groups to “support the just demands of the Palestinian prisoners.” In a press conference in Jerusalem, human rights groups and Israeli Arab organizations also called on the Israeli government to improve the conditions of the prisoners.

Israeli lawyer Lea Tsemel, who recently visited Beer Sheva prison in the south of the country, said that prisoners who had been taken sick were only being offered food and not medication. “The sick prisoners are locked in a room, tempted with food for five hours and, if they refuse to eat, returned to their cells without treatment,” she said.

Hannah Friedman, executive director of the public committee against torture in Israel, said her organization had complained to the prison authorities about a water stoppage in the same jail.

“Israeli is in complete violation of the international conventions it has signed regarding prisoners’ rights,” she added.