Walid Daqqa was never able to leave the “place without a door,” an expression he used to evoke prison, in his discussions with his daughter, Milad, now aged 4. The Palestinian writer, a citizen of Israel, spent 38 years in prison, where he died on Sunday, April 7, at the age of 62. He was suffering from a rare form of bone marrow cancer, diagnosed in December 2022. Last year, the Israeli legal system rejected his request for early release on health grounds. Since October 7, 2023, Daqqa “has been tortured, humiliated, denied family visits and has faced further medical neglect. During this period, he was transferred to hospital twice due to health deteriorations,” warned the NGO Amnesty International in March, calling for his release. He had only seen his lawyer once in six months.
On Monday, his brother, Assad Daqqa, explained to the online publication Arab 48 that his remains had not been returned to the family, on the orders of the minister of national security, the Jewish supremacist Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir wrote on X on Sunday evening that he regretted that Walid Daqqa had died naturally and would have preferred to see him sentenced to “the death penalty for terrorists.” On Monday afternoon, Israeli police brutally dispersed visitors who had come to pay their respects at the deceased’s home in Baqa al-Gharbiyye, in central Israel, and arrested five people, Arab 48 journalists reported. Israeli security forces did not respond to requests to comment from Le Monde.
Daqqa should have died free: He had served his original sentence. Arrested on March 25, 1986, he was sentenced the following year by an Israeli military court to life imprisonment for his membership in a Palestinian armed cell responsible for the kidnapping and murder of an Israeli soldier, Moshe Tamam, in 1984. Daqqa was not present at the time of the kidnapping and was not convicted of murder. In 2012, his life sentence was reduced to 37 years – he should have been released in March 2023. But in 2018, he was sentenced to a further two years in prison for smuggling cell phones into the prison.
Since October 7, 2023, 15 Palestinians have died in Israeli cells, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club. Twenty-seven other Gazan detainees have died in ad hoc detention camps, opened in the wake of the war in Gaza, from which nothing filters and where the army locks up some of those it arrests in the Palestinian enclave, outside any legal framework. In a letter addressed to the Israeli authorities and revealed by the newspaper Haaretz on April 4, a doctor working in the field hospital of one of these camps in southern Israel revealed that detainees are fed with straws, defecate in diapers and are constantly shackled.
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