Khader Adnan’s Death: A Wake-Up Call for the World’s Conscience

This morning, Palestinian leader Khader Adnan died in an Israeli dungeon after 86 days of hunger strike, protesting his unjust detention by the Israeli government without charge or trial. He left behind a wife and nine children. A medic from Physicians for Human Rights Israel had warned Israeli authorities that Adnan was facing “imminent death,” but that did not dissuade the Israeli government from keeping him in shackles and denying his freedom.

Adnan is a renowned symbol of the Palestinian prisoners’ struggle for freedom, having been arrested 12 times and spending nearly eight years in Israeli prisons, mostly in “administrative detention,” an obscene Israeli practice of holding Palestinians indefinitely without charge or trial. Currently, more than 1000 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons under this practice.

Israel’s regime of mass arrests and imprisonment of Palestinians is a systematic effort to entrench its illegal occupation and apartheid over Palestinian life. This regime doesn’t even spare children, who are systematically abused and brutalized in Israeli military detention. Israel is the only country that processes children through a military court system, where thousands of Palestinian children have experienced this abuse. Some, like Adnan, would rather find freedom in death than be imprisoned in life by the shackles of Israel’s brutal occupation. 

Adnan has died, but his life of resistance will not be forgotten. His death should serve as a wake-up call for those that remain silent as  Israel destroys Palestinian lives and continues denying them freedom as they have for decades, not just in the dungeons of indefinite detention but in the far bigger prison of military occupation and apartheid. On April 25th, President Biden said in a statement celebrating 75 years of the apartheid state, “As a life-long friend and supporter of the State of Israel, I have worked my entire career to deepen and strengthen our partnership.” This partnership has done nothing but enable a full-fledged ethnic cleansing campaign against the Palestinian people. It is well past time for the world, and the U.S. government in particular as the biggest supporter of Israel’s apartheid government, to raise its voice and demand an end to Israel’s ongoing crimes against Palestinians via viable action and accountability.

We at AMP will continue to fight for a fundamental change in U.S. policy toward Palestine and Israel. We do so in solidarity with all the Palestinian prisoners held in the occupation’s prisons, and we will continue this fight until every last Palestinian is free.