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Israel set to approve controversial force-feeding bill

The Israeli Knesset is set to approve a bill that would allow force feeding of Palestinian prisoners under certain conditions.
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July 6, 2015

This article first appeared on The Media Line.

The Israeli Knesset is set to approve a bill that would allow force feeding of Palestinian prisoners under certain conditions. The bill is similar to one that was about to be approved last year, before the Knesset was disbanded and new elections are held.

According to Israeli law, bills that were in the process of being approved can be picked up from where they were beforehand, rather than having to begin the process again.

“The bill was created for political reasons to coerce Palestinian hunger strikers into breaking their hunger strike,” Amany Dayif, the director of the Prisoners and Detainees Department at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) told The Media Line. “The prisoners use hunger strikes to demand an end to administrative detention and solitary confinement, to allow family visits and to allow prisoners to continue their educations.”

PHR-Israel sharply condemned the proposed bill.

“The bill is ethically, medically and morally unacceptable,” PHR said. “By pushing physicians to engage in force-feeding the Israeli government threatens to defile the medical profession, its values and professionalism.”

The Chairman of the Israeli Medical Association, Leonid Eidelman, also criticised the bill, saying force-feeding prisoners against their will is “unethical”.

But the Ministry of Public Security is advocating for the bill, saying it is needed to save prisoners lives. Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan said striking prisoners could pose a threat to Israel. The Ministry says the decision will be made only in exceptional cases.

“Alongside attempts to boycott and delegitimize Israel, hunger strikes of terrorists in prisons have become a means to threaten Israel,” Erdan said on his Facebook page.

According to the current version of the bill, which is not as stringent as the previous version, force feeding will only be allowed if a physician believes that without it, “there is a real possibility that within a short time, the prisoner is at risk of death or irreversible disability.”

The bill was first proposed in 2014 when dozens of prisoners were on an extended hunger strike. Israeli officials worry that if a Palestinian prisoner died in jail, it could spark riots in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In April, there were 5800 Palestinian prisoners, including 440 administrative detainees, meaning they are being held without charges or trial and 11 members of the Palestinian National Council.

The bill to allow force feeding could have been used in the recent case of Khader Adnan, a long-time Palestinian prisoner being held under administrative detention who was on the verge of death after a 50-day hunger strike. Late last month, he broke his hunger strike after Israel agreed to his release.

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