“Israel isn’t doing enough to free me. I am launching a hunger strike.”

With these words, Ouda Tarabin ended his letter to the Israeli Embassy in Cairo. Ouda has spent the past twelve years in an Egyptian prison, after being convicted of espionage. In his handwritten letter he claimed that Egypt did not grant him a fair trial. He asked that his letter be relayed to Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.

In 2000, Tarabin was apprehended in the Sinai by Egypt’s Mukhabarat intelligence service, after crossing the border illegally. According to his family, he did this so that he could visit his married sister, who lives in el-Arish. Until the Israeli peace treaty with Egypt (1979), the Tarabin family lived in the Sinai, but with the return of the peninsula to Egyptian sovereignty, the family relocated to the village of Dahaniyeh in the Gaza Strip, which had a reputation as being a safe haven for collaborators with Israel. In 1991, the family moved again, this time to an unrecognized settlement near Rahat in the Negev.

In March 2000, nine months before he was apprehended in the Sinai, Ouda and his father Soliman Tarabin were charged with spying and tried in absentia in Egypt. The father was sentenced to 25 years in prison. His son received a 15-year sentence.