Muatan, 48, from the town of Burqa, east of Ramallah, is a father of four. He was diagnosed with colon cancer and his condition is continually getting worse.

Israeli authorities renewed on Wednesday the administrative detention sentence against cancer-stricken Palestinian prisoner Abdul Baset Muatan for a period of six months, the Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) said in a statement.

Muatan’s current sentence was supposed to end on July 23. This is the third order against him since his arrest in July 2022.

Muatan, 48, from the town of Burqa, east of Ramallah, is a father of four. He was diagnosed with colon cancer and his condition is continually getting worse.

The PPS accused Israel of slowly murdering Palestinian prisoners, through its medical negligence policy, urging the immediate release of Muatan, to allow him to pursue proper treatment at hospitals.

Muatan has spent a total of nine years behind Israeli bars for his resistance to the occupation, most of it in administrative detention.

Administrative prisoners have neither been charged with a crime nor granted a trial, and they are prevented from seeing the evidence against them. The detention orders typically last between three to six months and can be renewed indefinitely.

“Administrative detention is Israel’s go-to legal proceeding when it simply wants to mute the voices of Palestinian political activists, but lacks any concrete evidence that can be presented in an open, military court,” wrote Palestinian journalist and editor of The Palestine Chronicle, Ramzy Baroud.

“Not that Israel’s military courts are an example of fairness and transparency. Indeed, when it comes to Palestinians, the entire Israeli judicial system is skewed. But administrative detention is a whole new level of injustice,” Baroud added.

(PC, WAFA)