Israeli authorities on Monday released former hunger striker Hasan Safadi, the Palestinian Authority prisoners minister told the Bethlehem-based Ma’an news.
Minister Issa Qaraqe said Safadi had been freed from Hadarim jail in central Israel.
Safadi, who stopped a 93-day hunger strike in September, is one of two prisoners who ended a hunger strike after assurances they would be freed at the end of their current administrative detention term.
Ma’an reported that Safadi was detained from his home in Shechem (Nablus) in June of 2011.
He launched a previous 71-day hunger strike on March 5, which he ended when some 2,000 prisoners joined the strikes, resulting in an agreement with Israeli authorities.
When Safadi's detention order was renewed on June 21, he re-launched his strike, the report said.
Hunger striking to bring about a release from Israeli prisons has become a very common phenomenon among PA Arab terrorist prisoners in recent months.
In April, Israel released Hana Shalbi, a female terrorist, after a 43-day hunger strike.
Shalbi, a terrorist from the Islamic Jihad organization, was arrested for terrorist activity in 2010. She refused to cooperate with interrogators and was violent towards them. This violence included threatening their lives, trying to attack one of them, spitting at police officers, and even biting a policewoman.
Another famous case of a hunger striking terrorist being released is that of Khader Adnan, who had gone a on a hunger strike for 66 days to pressure the State to release him. The hunger strike resulted in Adnan being admitted to hospital.
He launched the hunger strike to protest his administrative detention and the strike became a cause célèbre for anti-Israel activists and Arab propaganda organizations. His attorneyappealed his administrative detention order to Israel's Supreme Court.
The State later caved in to the pressure and agreed not to renew Adnan’s administrative detention order. He, in turn, agreed to end his hunger strike.
As part of a deal to end the last mass hunger strike, Israel made some concessions to the PA, including an agreement to stop placing prisoners in solitary confinement.
In addition, Israel agreed to allow prisoners to call relatives, to pursue academic studies, and to allow prisoners from Gaza as well as from Judea and Samaria to receive visits from family members.
The deal also included a release of the bodies of 91 terrorists to the PA. The release of the bodies was s another in an ongoing series of “gestures” by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to the PA, in an effort to encourage PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to agree to return to negotiations with Israel.
So far, the PA has refused, although Abbas has accepted Israel's “gestures.”