BETHLEHEM, West Bank, 31 August 2004 — Hundreds of Palestinians resumed a hunger strike in an Israeli prison yesterday, accusing the authorities of reneging on pledges to hold talks on conditions, a prisoners’ group said. The quasi-government Palestinian Prisoners’ Association said that inmates at Shikma prison in the southern Israeli town of Ashkelon had begun refusing food again at breakfast yesterday.
Detainees had suspended their strike on Friday on the 13th day of the open-ended protest which is being observed by up to half of the 8,000 prisoners in Israeli jails. But a spokesman for the association said that authorities which had promised to allow the Ashkelon prisoners to make contact with inmates in other centers to coordinate their positions had now reversed their position.
A spokesman for the Israeli prison service, Ian Domnitz, confirmed that prisoners were again refusing food but denied that any deal had ever been done.
“On Friday, 350 to 400 prisoners went back to eat,” he told AFP. “Today the prisoners refused to receive the meals but they continue to eat and drink from the canteen supplies they have been receiving over the last two days.
In Bethlehem, some 300 people marched in solidarity with the prisoners up to an Israeli military checkpoint at the entrance to the West Bank town but there were no reports of clashes.
Erekat said that he had called on the EU to “intervene immediately in order to force the Israeli government to respect international law and the Geneva Convention concerning the Palestinian prisoners.” Erekat said he was ready to meet with any Israeli official to discuss the prisoners issue “as their life is now in danger after 16 days on hunger strike.”
Meanwhile, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer told reporters that the planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was an opportunity to kick-start the troubled peace process but made his opposition clear to recent announcements of major expansion of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. “We stick to the road map and to the freeze of settlements,” Fischer said. The European Union is one of the four sponsors of the road map which requires Israel to halt all construction work in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, the United States, another of the sponsors, has tacitly softened its opposition to “natural growth” projects in some of the largest settlement blocs near Jerusalem.
