Israeli military prison authorities allowed for a Palestinian political spokesperson, Khader Adnan, to die in his prison cell after entering day 87 of a hunger strike this Tuesday morning. The political prisoner’s death was dubbed an assassination by the Palestinian Prisoners Society organization and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement. Israel claims no wrong doing, as Western media pretend that Tel Aviv had no hand in the public figure’s death.
Khader Adnan was a prominent Palestinian political figure from Arrabeh village in Jenin and was the spokesperson for the PIJ movement in the West Bank. He rose to prominence in the late 1990’s, advocating for resistance against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. This led to Israeli occupation forces arresting and imprisoning him a total of 12 times over the course of two decades, where he would go on to launch hunger strikes in protest of what have been described as erroneous charges — cooked up by a military court system that carries a 99.7% conviction rate. In 2012, Khader Adnan went on a 66-day hunger strike, then in 2014 he conducted a 56-day hunger strike.
On February 5, Israeli occupation forces raided Jenin and kidnapped Khader Adnan from his home. Adnan was placed under Administrative Detention — in other words, he was held without charge using a procedure which allows Israel to detain people for renewable periods of 6 months without the filing of charges or trial, all in “the only democracy on the Middle East”. This led Adnan to begin another hunger strike in order to try and achieve his release from Israeli military prison. He lasted a total of 87 days without food, while his family repeatedly called upon the Israeli prison authorities to hospitalize him, his wife warning that he could die at any moment after the hunger strike had lasted 80 days. Physicians For Human Rights Israel, a medical human rights group, warned that Khader Adnan “faces imminent death” and called for an urgent hospital transfer. On Tuesday morning, he was then “found unconscious in his cell” the Israel Prison Service stated.
Khader Adnan was killed by the Israeli authorities, who have a legal obligation to provide care to prisoners, allowing for a man that was not part of any military activity, who was held without a charge, and who was simply calling for a release date to be issued, to slowly die of starvation in a cold cell. Israel had received warnings from the PIJ movement, based in the besieged Gaza Strip, that if he was allowed to die from medical neglect, it would be considered to be an assassination and that this would trigger a response from the armed wing of the movement.
Israel reported mortar fire from Gaza on Tuesday morning, which no group claimed responsibility for and allegedly landed in an open area. The Israeli military then used tanks to bombard training sites, owned by the armed wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades. At around 3:30PM (Palestine time), 22 rockets were then fired into Sderot, from Gaza, with Israel’s air defense system reportedly only intercepting 4. An Israeli settler’s house, a building site, and two cars were allegedly damaged by the rocket fire, while a 25-year-old Israeli man was severely injured and administered to hospital care. Israeli Hebrew media outlets reported that 6 Israelis had been injured by the rocket fire, however, the other five were treated for panic attacks.
The Joint Room of Palestinian resistance factions, based in the Gaza Strip, announced that they had fired the rocket barrage at Israeli settlement areas in response to the assassination of Khader Adnan, also stating that this will only be one part of a larger response from all sectors of Palestinian society. This meant that all the armed factions in Gaza had adopted the rocket fire as jointly coordinated, not isolating the salvo fired to any specific group and hence making it difficult for Israel to justify conducting its next round of attacks against a single armed group. The statement also suggests that armed attacks may take place in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and elsewhere in response to the killing of Khader Adnan.
If the rocket fire had not caused such an embarrassment to Israel’s air defense systems, in addition to injuring an Israeli, they would not have been pressured to carry out a large response. However, radical right wing members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition began calling for a large military operation, in order to achieve “deterrence” against the groups in the Gaza Strip. Israeli settlers in Sderot are also outraged, after the terrifying experience of witnessing rockets fall in their proximity and cause damage to property, they too pressured the Israeli establishment to retaliate in a brutal manner.
Despite the aspirations of Israeli radicals, the ability of the Israeli military to achieve “deterrence” is extremely far-stretched and the establishment realists (Prime Minister Netanyahu included) understand this well. It is at this point that the calculations had to be made as to whether they would carry out a number of strikes that ostensibly target Palestinian leaders in places like Gaza and Syria, or to hit soft targets and wait to implement assassination plots later in the year. During Ramadan, after rocket fire from Lebanon hit Israeli settlements in northern occupied Palestine, the Israeli political and military leaderships decided to de-escalate, for fear of being dragged into a confrontation with the powerful Lebanese Hezbollah.
The initial Ramadan incursions into al-Aqsa mosque, where Israeli occupation police forces had brutally attacked hundreds of worshippers, ended quickly after the rocket fire from southern Lebanon. A day later there were two batches of rockets fired from Syria, hitting Israeli settlements in the occupied Golan Heights. These two events, combined with threats from Iraq’s Kataeb Hezbollah and Yemen’s Ansarallah, to join in on a war against Israel to protect al-Aqsa mosque, triggered a shift in how Tel Aviv was to calculate its next moves. It is still possible that in the case of a war on Gaza, that Israel may also be struck from Lebanon and to a lesser extent from Syria, and this would be a catastrophe for Israel, which would then be forced to confront precision missiles that would be fired in the event that Hezbollah is drawn into the conflict.
