Terminally ill Palestinian prisoner dies after 38 years in Israeli custody

2024-4-10 20:58| 发布者：north_falcon| 查看：5| 评论：0 |来自: 加国同城 58.ca

摘要：Walid Daqqa, one of the longest-serving Palestinian prisoners in Israel, died of cancer on Sunday at the age of 63 after almost four decades of incarceration.

Walid Daqqa, one of the longest-serving Palestinian prisoners in Israel, died of cancer on Sunday at the age of 63 after almost four decades of incarceration.

Daqqa’s case was unique. At the time of his death, he was the longest imprisoned Palestinian in Israel, with the second-longest sentence served overall, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society.

He was also one of the few Palestinian prisoners to have been continuously incarcerated since prior to the Oslo Accords, a series of agreements between Israel and the Palestinians in the 1990s that resulted in a number of Palestinians being released from Israeli prisons. Born in the Israeli town of Baqa al-Gharbiyye in the northern “triangle” region, Daqqa was a Palestinian citizen of Israel.

A spokesperson for the Israel Prison Service on Monday confirmed Daqqa’s death and said in a statement that his death will be investigated “like any event of this nature.”

In Israel, Daqqa was seen as a terrorist after he was convicted in connection with the killing of a soldier. But to many Palestinians, he was a symbol of their struggle for liberation from Israel.

Daqqa was arrested in March 1986 and sentenced to life in prison after an Israeli court convicted him of commanding the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) militant group, which abducted and killed 19-year-old Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984. Daqqa was not convicted of carrying out the murder but of commanding the group, which he denied, Amnesty International said. Tamam’s niece Ortal said on X that her uncle was subjected to torture before being killed.

In 2012, Israel reduced his sentence to 37 years, which he completed in 2023. He was then charged by an Israeli court with smuggling mobile phones to prisoners, and was given an added sentence of two years, according to the Palestinian Commission of Detainee Affairs. He died before his scheduled release date of March 24, 2025.

The Commission and the Palestinian Prisoners Society, based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said in a statement that during his detention, Daqqa “faced the policies of torture, assault, deprivation and isolation, in addition to successive medical crimes.”

CNN has reached out to the Israel Prison Service for comment on the allegations.

‘Weight lifted from my chest’: niece

“The way he was murdered was so brutal and inhumane,” Orla Tamam, the niece of Moshe Tamam, told CNN on Tuesday.

Moshe had been returning from a weekend visiting his girlfriend in Tiberias when he was kidnapped at the Beit Lid Junction in Israel, according to Tamam.

“When (Daqqa) died in jail, I was very happy,” Tamam said, adding that she felt relief after she and her family had fought for years to keep Daqqa in prison rather than have his sentence reduced.

Orla Tamam, who is a medical doctor in Israel, told CNN, “to be honest, I’m a doctor, I spent my life helping people be healthy. I save life, I try to make it better for my patients. Never in my life did I think I’d be happy that someone died. But I was so happy, I felt like so much weight was lifted from my chest.”

“We fought hard to keep him in prison, and every moment of struggle paid off,” Tamam wrote on X.