Yigal Amir, who's serving a life sentence for the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was brought to the Central District Court in Lod on Thursday afternoon after he filed an urgent petition on Friday.
In the petition, Amir claimed that he was being denied many rights, including telephone calls and visitation rights solely because he is a "high-profile prisoner."
Amir lost his telephone privileges following a phone conversation with rapper Yoav Eliasi, in which Amir tried to recruit Eliasi to join a political party to promote his release from prison.
In a court hearing, the police representative said, "His telephone priviliges were revoked on August 12 as part of the denial of administrative benefits. He's a security prisoner and as a rule, security prisoners aren't entitled to maintain contact with the outside. There's an exception in the ordinance which allows contact with the outside under certain circumstances but doesn't apply to all security prisoners. Even this is allowed as a benefit, not a right."
About a month ago, Yigal Amir held a hunger strike in protest of the worsening conditions of his imprisonment and the denial of a number of rights he had won in recent years. Amir ended the hunger strike after 11 days. Amir's wife, Larissa Trimbobler Amir, claimed he stopped the strike in light of the media's disregard for his suffering.
"Yesterday my husband stopped the hunger strike after 11 days," Larissa wrote in a Facebook post. "During the entire strike, the media ignored it or published lies."
"There wasn't even one reporter at the Supreme Court hearing on Thursday," she continued. "Based on the experience of dozens of petitions and hearings, I will say that this is an unprecedented situation and it's not a coincidence. And it's not a coincidence that I was offered to be interviewed on mainstream media five times recently and all (!!!) the interviews were canceled, some at the last minute."
"Free press? Or political pressure and revenge on a lonely defenseless individual who has already been persecuted for 24 years? Obviously a hunger strike has no effect if it's not covered by the media. Can you imagine the media ignoring the hunger strike of any other prisoner? Even the worst terrorist?"
"This is nothing new. They won't break him or us or his family just like they didn't succeed in breaking us for so many years."