Israeli forces shoot, kill Palestinian attacker in West Bank

In two similar attacks on Saturday, forces shot dead a Palestinian who stabbed a policeman in the northern West Bank, hours after another Palestinian who stabbed a soldier near a checkpoint in the occupied territory was shot and wounded.

Allan, 30 years old, is basically a Palestinian lawyer and he is admitted at an Israeli hospital in critical condition.

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.

The Electronic Intifada noted that Ha’aretz had reported that the Israeli state “fears that such a move could encourage administrative detainees to follow Allan’s lead, especially after seven Palestinian detainees began their own respective hunger strikes over the past two weeks”. “They gave him the offer to remain in the Israeli hospital to die or remain in Israeli prison without reason, or to be exiled”. The family of Avraham Mengistu, 28 and of Ethiopian descent, decided to take their campaign public to push for his release after having previously criticized the Israeli authorities over their response to his disappearance.

The militant Islamic Jihad movement describes Allan as a member, and Israel has used administrative detention to hold Palestinians they deem to be security risks while not divulging what authorities view as sensitive intelligence. In June, it freed Khader Adnan, a 36-year-old senior activist in Islamic Jihad, after a 55-day hunger strike protesting his detention without charge. Allan is on his 64th day of hunger strike, intended to secure his release.

On Monday, hundreds of Palestinians in Hebron held a peaceful rally in the southern West Bank city’s center, waving Palestinian flags and holding Allan’s picture while calling for his release.

Israel’s Supreme Court has delayed a decision on whether to free a hunger-striking Palestinian prisoner.

A senior Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to address the issue publicly, hinted that force-feeding remains an option in the case of Allan. The soldier received medical treatment at the scene.

To force-feed, the doctor must restrain the conscious and shackled prisoner and insert a tube into his or her empty stomach.

At a hearing on Monday, one of the doctors treating Allan said that if he were to resume his hunger strike, he was likely to go into a fatal decline.

‘Today we saw police brutality, ‘ says a participant at protest for Palestinian hunger striker Muhammad Allan in Ashkelon. Allan made no request before falling unconscious as to whether he wanted to receive life-saving treatment, al-Khatib said. Rubinstein urged the sides to reach a compromise on the matter, which has forced tensions to flare and sparked a debate in Israel over the ethics of the country’s new force-feeding law.