Local Editor

Palestinian prisoner Maisarah Abu Hamdiah was martyred Tuesday in an "Israeli" jail, as the plight of Palestinian inmates continues in "Israeli" detention facilities.

Acting Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas held the Zionist entity responsible for the death of Abu Hamdiah.
"Prisoner Maisara Abu Hamdyieh died today. He had cancer," Qadura Fares, head of the Prisoners Club, stated.

Fares accused "Israel" of being responsible for his death due to its "refusal to release him for treatment," despite repeated appeals, some from abroad.

Itidal said that her brother does not stay in a hospital, and is transferred from the Eshel prison in Bir al-Saba (Beersheva) - a city in the Negev (Naqab) region of southern "Israel" - to the Saroka hospital for treatment.
"The doctors knew it was cancer but did not tell Maysara this," said al-Alami. "It was only in March when they finally told him about his cancer and it was during this month when he finally began to receive chemotherapy sessions at the Saroka hospital." The sessions have temporarily stopped because of the Jewish holidays.
"I can't imagine the pain he goes through just to get to the hospital," Itidal, Maysara's sister, said. "Transferring prisoners in the bosta [a prison vehicle with no windows and a corrugated metal interior with no seats] is already hard, but for a cancer patient it must be hell."

Born in al-Khalil in 1948, Abuhamdia joined the revolutionary ranks fighting the "Israeli" occupation when he was 20 years old.
Abuhamdia's first arrest came in 1969, when he was accused of belonging to the Union of Palestinian Students. He later studied electronics in Cairo and received a diploma from there. Afterwards, he moved to Lebanon and then Syria, where he joined Fatah's military camps.
He tried to obtain a degree in law at the University of Beirut between 1970 and 1975 but due to his constant arrests and pursuit by "Israeli" intelligence and Arab collaborators, he couldn't finish his studies, and instead worked in Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait and Jordan. Whenever Abuhamdia would come home back to the West Bank, he would be arrested during that time period. He was held as part of the "Israeli" policy of administrative detention, a form of internment that holds prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial.

After the signing of the Oslo accords between PLO officials and "Israel" in 1993, the "Israeli" authorities refused to include Abuhamdia as one of the "returnees" to Palestine. It wasn't until 1998 that Abuhamdia finally returned to Palestine, after Yasser Arafat's intervention.
Abuhamdia settled into life in the West Bank once again, and worked in the newly-formed Palestinian Authority's Preventive Security Force. He was arrested during the second intifada on 28 May 2002 with a long list of charges issued against him, some of which dated back to 1991.

"My father spent 105 days at the Moskobiyeh detention center under interrogation," Abuhamdia's son Tariq said, referring to the notorious interrogation facility known in English as the Russian Compound. "He never gave the interrogator any information. "Israel" found great difficulty in determining which faction he belonged to. In the seventies, they thought he was working with the PFLP [the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine]. Now they are accusing him of being affiliated with Hamas while at the same time cooperating with Fatah."

On 2 June 2005, Abuhamdia was sentenced to prison for 25 years. Two years later - on 22 April 2007 - the "Israeli" military prosecutors appealed his sentencing and his was sentence extended to 99 years in prison.
Abuhamdia is looked to as a leader by the other prisoners due to his older age and sentence, and spent the years in Eshel prison. He was studying history in Gaza's Al-Aqsa University via correspondence before his health took a turn for the worse.
"My father loved literature. In addition to Arabic, he could read Hebrew and English," said Tariq. "In prison, he was basically a writer and a teacher.

He wrote about life in prison, political analysis and other topics and was published in many journals. He loved Russian literature, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and gave daily lectures to prisoners about the modern history of Palestine and geopolitics to raise their level of knowledge and awareness. The younger prisoners consider him as a father for them."

In 2007, Abuhamdia became another victim of the Ramleh "slaughterhouse" after he was admitted to that prison clinic because of a painful stomach ulcer. He wrote a letter describing the deliberate medical negligence of the "Israeli" Prison Service and the cruel behavior of doctors toward the sick prisoners, who he said were subjected to medical experimentation without their consent. In an excerpt translated and posted by Tariq and found on the Facebook support page, Maysara Abuhamdia states:
"The intentional negligence starts during the treatment, when the doctors receive orders to not cure the patient but to give him painkillers without any restoration of the damaged parts."
He adds, "These instructions come from the "Israeli" security apparatus, and the goal is to keep the prisoners alive but not cured to be a lesson to others."

In his letter Abuhamdia refers to the ill-treatment afforded to other sick prisoners at Ramleh, such as Alaa Hassouneh, who is described as suffering from heart disease but is only given painkillers. Another prisoner, Mansour Maqoudeh, was shot in the spine during his arrest by the occupation forces in 2002, which left him paralyzed. He was given injections in his abdomen by the "Israeli" Prison Service that caused him intestinal damage. Maqoudeh suffers from bouts of convulsions and unconsciousness, and can only urinate through a plastic bag, as Maqoudeh's lawyer told the Arabic-language outlet Donia Alwatan last month.

It is no secret that the sick prisoners in Ramleh are cruelly mistreated.

Former hunger striker Khader Adnan once described to this author the inhumane way these prisoners were treated by "Israeli" authorities, as they lay helpless and in pain on their hospital beds."Some were beaten occasionally, others were chained by their arms and legs to their hospital beds, still others were placed in some sort of cages and totally ignored," Adnan said. "It's simply a horrifying place."
Since 1967, 51 Palestinian prisoners in "Israeli" jails have died from medical negligence. There are currently 700 prisoners in need of medical attention, and 18 in the Ramleh prison hospital, according to the Palestine News Network.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by moqawama.org