Egyptian Prisoners Languish In Israeli Jails
Egyptian prisoners in Israeli jails are launching a hunger strike, in the hope that Cairo starts taking interest in their plight, writes Shlomi Eldar.
They stand, just barely, on the lowest rung of that metaphorical ladder, ranking the dregs of the Israeli prison system. They are far beneath the security detainees held in Prison Service facilities. They are even below refugees from Darfur and Eritrea, who came here seeking employment and asylum, but who ended up in jails and detention camps instead. I’m talking about the 62 Egyptian prisoners being held in Israel. No one wants them. No one even asks about them. Almost no one seems to care about their well-being.
This week, one of them, Mohamed Aida, had his lawyer relay a letter to Doctors for Human Rights in Egypt. He hoped that this letter would somehow find its way to Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. It did make its way to Al-Monitor. In it, Aida writes: “The Egyptian government has forgotten about us. It disregards our very existence, so we are launching a hunger strike.”
Should it actually take place, this hunger strike by Egyptian prisoners would run parallel to the hunger strike that Israel prisoner Ouda Tarabin announced two weeks ago on April 23, from his cell in Tora prison in Egypt. The story of Tarabin’s abandonment and neglect, in this case by the Israeli government, appears in an earlier article published on this site.
There is a certain symmetry between what Egyptian prisoner Aida wrote and what Tarabin wrote in a letter intended for the Israeli ambassador to Egypt: “Israel has not done enough to obtain my release, so I am launching a hunger strike.” This came after Tarabin served 12 years in an Egyptian prison. It is, however, only recently that Israel has begun to discuss his release with the Egyptian authorities. These efforts must be credited to his lawyer, Yitzhak Meltzer, who successfully focused Israeli public opinion on the travesty suffered by this Israeli prisoner.
