Moroccans burn Israeli flags in solidarity with Palestinian hunger strike

Rasa - Moroccans have held a protest rally outside the parliament in the capital, Rabat, in a show of solidarity with hundreds of Palestinians on hunger strike in Israeli jails.

News ID: 429397

Date: 02 May 2017 - 22:22

RNA - On Monday, the protesters chanted anti-Israeli slogans and burned the regime’s flags in support of the Palestinian prisoners kept behind bars by the Israeli regime in dire humanitarian conditions.

The protest action came on Monday as scores of Moroccan labor union demonstrators marked International Workers’ Day.

More than 1,600 Palestinian prisons have reportedly taken part in the mass hunger strike called by former Fatah leader and prisoner, Marwan Barghouti, to protest persisting inhumane conditions in Israeli prison facilities.

The move has won backing by Gaza-based Islamic Hamas resistance movement, as well as the Palestinian National Council and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah.

The mass hunger strike effort dubbed the Freedom and Dignity Strike began on April 17 by Palestinian inmates to protest brutal conditions in Israeli regime’s prison facilities as well as its arbitrary arrest of Palestinians under an official policy of “administrative detention,” which allows jailing of locals without charge or trial.

The development came as the hunger strike protest movement claimed its first victim on Monday, when a 30-year-old former prisoner in Israeli jails, identified as Mazan al-Maghrebi, died at his Ramallah home more than two weeks after joining the strike. Al-Maghrebi was suffering from a kidney disease.

According to January figures provided by the Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer, nearly 6,500 Palestinians are being held captive in Israeli jails, 536 of them without charge or trial.

Palestinian prisoners have continuously resorted to open-ended hunger strikes in efforts to voice their outrage at the Israeli regime’s policy of administrative detentions targeting Palestinians.

Palestinian inmates also complain that they are often subjected to assault and torture inside Israeli prisons.

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