An independent and non-governmental rights organization says cancer-stricken Palestinian prisoner Walid Daqqa has died from medical complications he sustained as a result of his decades-long detention in the occupying regime’s jails.
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) announced in a statement on Sunday that 62-year-old Daqqa lost his life at Shamir Medical Center, formerly Assaf Harofeh Medical Center, located 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) southeast of Tel Aviv.
The deceased Palestinian prisoner’s health condition dramatically deteriorated since March 2023 after he was taken to hospital, suffering from severe pneumonia and acute kidney failure.
A year earlier, Daqqa had been diagnosed with Myelofibrosis – a rare form of bone marrow cancer that disrupts the body’s normal production of blood cells.
In April 2022, he underwent lung surgery at the Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon, following a sharp decline in his condition. A large part of his right lung was removed.
He had suffered a stroke a month earlier, according to Addameer, a rights group that supports Palestinian prisoners.
Daqqa was detained on March 25, 1986, along with a group of his comrades for taking part in a Palestinian resistance operation targeting an Israeli soldier. For this, they were all given life sentences. He was one of the longest-held inmates in Israeli jails.
Hundreds of the inmates have been incarcerated under the practice of administrative detention.
Human rights organizations say Israel violates all the rights and freedoms granted to prisoners by the Fourth Geneva Convention. They say administrative detention violates their right to due process since the evidence is withheld from prisoners while they are held for lengthy periods without being charged, tried, or convicted.
Palestinian detainees have continuously resorted to open-ended hunger strikes in an attempt to express outrage at their detention.
Israeli jail authorities keep Palestinian prisoners under deplorable conditions without proper hygienic standards. Palestinian inmates have also been subject to systematic torture, harassment, and repression.
