MPPM expresses solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners on hunger strike and helds Israel responsible for their illegal policy of occupation and violence

The hunger strike initiated by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails - which is reinforced and expanded every day, with new members - is a rallying cry, radical and courageous, released worldwide on the condition of the martyred Palestinian people. With their silence and their determination, more than two thousand Palestinian prisoners make clear the violence of Israeli occupation, the iniquity of the situation that these people have been forced to live, and their indomitable will and determination to continue the struggle for the realization of their inalienable rights.

The situation in Israeli jails reflects the repressive, authoritarian and undemocratic nature of the policy conducted by the state of Israel. More than three hundred Palestinians are now imprisoned, many for several years, without having been pronounced against them a single charge, or without their own lawyers being able to prepare and present their defense. The isolation, sometimes for several years, the ban on family or even the lawyers visits, the beatings, torture and blackmail are common practices that Palestinian non-governmental organizations and Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations have denounced. The physical and psychological torture is common practice and sanctioned by the military and judicial branches of state of Israel.

The condition of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails illustrates, in a particularly vivid way, the tragedy of the Palestinian people under the Zionist occupation, the violence of a daily life made of systematic repression, ongoing dispossession of land, destruction of homes and farmland, expulsions, continuing expansion of settlements, meticulous application of a policy aimed at crushing their identity and national existence. Sixty-four years after the Nakba, the international community continues to watch, between passivity, indifference or complicity, the advance of Israeli occupation, making a dead letter of all the precepts of international law and order, and many hundreds of United Nations resolutions that condemn the state of Israel, that demand the end of the occupation and the full realization of national rights of the Palestinian people, beginning with the constitution of a state in the territories occupied in 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a just solution to the situation of Palestinian refugees.

The status of the health of many Palestinian prisoners - some nearing the seventy days of food deprivation - is extremely serious. The state of Israel, by deepening its policy of occupation, by the open defiance of international law, by the violence of its repressive apparatus, is entirely responsible for all consequences that may result from this extreme and courageous form of struggle adopted by Palestinian prisoners .

The National Directorate of MPPM expresses its strongest and most profound sympathy with the Palestinian prisoners, and through them, with all the people who are victims of Israeli occupation. The MPPM claims of Portuguese sovereign bodies a firm and determined intervention to held Israel responsible for the situation of Palestinian prisoners and demanding, compliance by that state, of the principles and norms of international and humanitarian law to which it is bound by its condition as a member of United Nations. The MPPM also calls for public opinion in Portugal, to be mobilized in the denunciation of the crimes of the Israeli occupation, and to assert its solidarity with the prisoners and the Palestinian people.