PCP Press Statement - April 20th, 2017
Since last Sunday, a hunger strike for undetermined time by Palestinian political prisoners is ongoing in Israeli prisons, involving at this time about 1,500 Palestinian patriots.
They protest against the degrading conditions they are subjected to, the arbitrary arrests, torture and isolation, medical neglect, humiliations, denial of basic rights, such as family visitation or education.
Their struggle for freedom and dignified conditions constitutes a brave, firm and determined expression of the long and heroic struggle of a people for freedom, against occupation and the destruction of their national existence.
The reply of the Israeli repressive apparatus to the struggle of the Palestinian political prisoners, placing some of the Palestinian leaders in isolation or transferring them to other detention centers with the threat of forced feeding —permitted by the Israeli Supreme Court but considered by humanitarian law and medical ethics as a form of torture—, illustrates the measure of brutality of the occupation regime the Palestinian people is subjected to on a daily basis.
The form of extreme struggle now adopted by prisoners of all Palestinian political organizations increasingly underlines the fundamental importance of the unity of the national resistance movement as a decisive instrument of the struggle for emancipation of Palestinian people.
Always committed to the struggle of the Palestinian people against Zionist occupation and for their right to constitute a free, viable and sovereign State with the 1967 borders and capital in East Jerusalem, PCP expresses its solidarity with the Palestinian patriots imprisoned by the Israeli authorities and holds Israel responsible for all the consequences that might result from this situation.
PCP underlines the urgency of reinforcing the solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle, and calls attention to the responsibility, namely of the United Nations, in protecting the rights of the Palestinian political prisoners on hunger strike in Israeli prisons.
PCP considers that the Portuguese government should strive and act, within the framework of International Law, for the rights of the Palestinian people, namely for the rights and freedom of the Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons.
Seventy years after the approval of the Partition Plan for Palestine and fifty years later the occupation of the West Bank of the Jordan River, the Gaza Strip and West Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights in Syria, it is time the Palestinian people realize their inalienable right to constitute a free, viable and sovereign State.
PCP Press Office
