(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - "There are now 1,350 Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike," said Sivan Weizman, spokeswoman for the Israel Prisons Service (IPS).
"An additional 150 prisoners joined the hunger strike over the weekend, bringing the total number of prisoners on hunger strike to 1,350," she told AFP.
On Tuesday, 1,200 prisoners began an open-ended hunger strike to protest the conditions in which they are being held as Palestinians across the territories marked Prisoners' Day, the IPS said.
Another 2,300 prisoners also joined a day-long fast.
Before Tuesday's mass protest, 10 Palestinian inmates of Zionist prisons were already on hunger strike, four of whom had been transferred to prison hospitals because of fragile health, the Palestinian Prisoners Club said.
Two of them, Bilal Diab, 27, and Thaer Halahla, 34, have now been refusing food for 54 days, with prisoner rights group Adameer describing their condition as "rapidly deteriorating."
All 10 are being held without charge under administrative detention orders, which means they can be held for renewable periods of up to six months.
There are 4,699 Palestinians being held in the Zionist jails, of whom 319 are in administrative detention, according to Prisoners Club figures.
Expressing solidarity with the Bahraini human rights activist Abd al-Hadi Al-Khawaja, the Chairman of the Committee for the Defense of Freedoms in the Occupied Territories of 1948, Ameer Makhoul, has sent a letter from his prison of Gilboa to al-Khawaja, in which he said: “Your Freedom Is Ours, and Our Freedom Is Yours.”
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