❶ From: MA’AN NEWS AGENCY
ISRAELI  COURT  TO  REVIEW  REQUEST  TO  FREE  PALESTINIAN  HUNGER  STRIKER
Aug. 17, 2015
BETHLEHEM ― The Israeli Supreme Court will consider a request by the Palestinian Authority Committee for Prisoner’s Affairs to release hunger striking Palestinian prisoner Muhammad Allan, head of the committee Issa Qaraqe said Monday.
____The Palestinian official made the comments to the official Wafa news agency, without providing further details.
____Muhammad Allan, 31, slipped into a coma on Friday after ingesting only water since June 18 in protest at his detention without charge by Israeli authorities.
____If and when he regains consciousness — and if he continues to refuse to eat — Israel’s government must decide whether it will invoke a law passed in July allowing the force-feeding of prisoners when their lives are endangered.
More . . .

❷ From: PALESTINE NEWS & INFORMATION AGENCY – WAFA
PRISONERS’  MINISTER:  SITUATION  IN  ISRAELI  JAILS  HEADING  TOWARD  ‘OUTBURST’
August 17, 2015
Ramallah ― Chairman of the Commission of Prisoners’’ Affairs (CPA), Minister Issa Qaraqe, said on Monday that the situation in Israeli prisons is heading towards an “outburst”.
____He said tension has run high in Israeli prisons after the Israeli prison authorities declined to meet a series of agreements concluded with the Palestinian prisoners, under which the authorities pledged to improve their prison conditions. . . .
[. . . .]
____Qaraqe stressed that efforts are being exerted to ensure [Muhammad] Allan’s release and provide him with the much needed treatment, after 65 days of hunger strike against his administrative detention, without charge or trial.
More. . .

❸ From: +972 MAGAZINE
ADMINISTRATIVE  DETENTION  BEING  USED  TO  PUSH  CONTROVERSIAL  ‘TERROR  LAW’
Sawsan Khalife’
August 16, 2015
A week after the Shin Bet recommended that Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon sign off on administrative detention for two Jewish Israelis following the attack in the Palestinian village of Duma, he also recommended the Knesset pass an “anti-terrorism bill.”
____The bill . . . authorizes the defense minister to use administrative detention without the standard prerequisite of declaring a “state of emergency” (which has been in place, essentially, since Israel’s founding). The law refers specifically to the administrative detention of Israeli civilians, since Palestinians in the occupied territories already live under a military regime.
The law will allow the court 48 hours to review the confidential evidence at hand, while the suspect will be denied the right to know the charges against him or her.
More. . .

❹ From: PALESTINE NEWS & INFORMATION AGENCY – WAFA
ISRAELI  ARMY  RAZES  LAND  NEAR  BETHLEHEM  TO  EXPAND  APARTHEID  WALL
August 17, 2015
BETHLEHEM― Israeli army Monday razed an agricultural land belonging to local Palestinians near the town of Beit Jala to the north of Bethlehem in preparation to expand the apartheid wall, according to local sources.
____Witnesses told WAFA that an Israeli army force accompanied by two heavy machinery broke into the area, planted with olive trees, and proceeded to raze the land, which has an area of around 30 dunums, for the expansion of the separation wall following an Israeli court order to the change the route of the wall.
____According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Eighty-five percent of the Israeli Separation Barrier is within the West Bank itself, not along the Green Line. In areas where the Separation Barrier has already been built, the extensive violations of human rights of Palestinians living nearby are evident.
More. . .
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❺ Opinion
From: PALESTINE NEWS NETWORK
BDS  ECHOES  PRISONERS  APPEAL  TO  BOYCOTT  ISRAELI  PRISON-INDUSTRIAL  COMPLEX
August 17, 2015
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) calls on people of conscience around the world to initiate and/or escalate boycott and divestment campaigns against the companies that are most complicit in these Israeli crimes, in response to an unprecedented appeal from Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails. The appeal came in the context of an escalation in Israel’s repression against Palestinian political prisoners. Israel’s systematic use of torture, a crime against humanity under international law, as a policy against Palestinian prisoners, including child prisoners, has recently seen a sharp rise.
____Israel, which remains one of few countries in the world that legalizes torture under circumstances deemed as “necessary,” has passed at the end of July a law allowing the force-feeding of Palestinian prisoners who have resorted to hunger strikes as a last ditch attempt to achieve their basic rights and dignity.
More. . .
Related (G4S website)

“JAIL  AND  CHILDREN,”  BY  RASHID  HUSSEIN
Don’t be sad, Darling!
To put me in prison, as they did, is a very easy thing!
But what can they do about the sun
Shining outside and torturing new rebels?

I should like to be romantic and say to you:
If my being in jail
Did nothing more than bring you to visit me
And cry in my arms ―
Then my arrest was not in vain.

But I’m not feeling romantic right now!
(How can one be romantic with the bedbugs
having such a feast?)
I’m just scratching away, and writing to you,
And asking myself this banal question:
If I and others don’t go to prison,
How will the prison guard
Feed his children?

Darling! I would so like for us
To have a baby!
We spoke of it once,
But I don’t know if
We’ll ever be given the chance.
That is why, for the time being, I give myself
To thoughts about the babies of others
Including my enemies’ babies!
And because they cannot understand this simple feeling
They put me here in prison.

From: Aruri, Naseer and Edmund Ghareeb, eds. ENEMY OF THE SUN: POETRY OF THE PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE. Washington, DC: Drum and Spear Press, 1970.
Available from Amazon.
Rashid Hussein (1936-1977) was born in Musmus, Palestine. He published his first collection in 1957 and established himself as a major Palestinian poet and orator. He participated in founding the Land Movement in 1959. He left in 1966 and lived in Syria and Lebanon and later in New York City where he died in February, 1977. He was buried a week later in Musmus. His funeral was attended by thousands of Palestinians. More. . .