Abdallah Declares Hunger Strike in Solidarity with Palestinian Detainees

Lebanese leftist militant Georges Abdallah, who has been jailed for nearly three decades in France, on Monday declared a hunger strike in solidarity with Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons, the Lebanon-based, pan-Arab television al-Mayadeen reported on Monday.

More than 4,000 Palestinian prisoners staged a one-day hunger strike on Sunday to protest the death of Palestinian inmate Arafat Jaradat.

Issa Qaraqaa, the Palestinian minister in charge of prisoner affairs, said Jaradat was tortured to death in an Israeli jail. The 30-year-old man from Sair near Hebron in the West Bank was arrested last Monday for alleged involvement in a November 2012 stone-throwing incident which injured an Israeli, according to Israel's Shin Bet domestic intelligence service.

Relations between Israel and the Palestinians were already tense because of a rising wave of protests in solidarity with four prisoners who have been on hunger strike for several months. Three were hospitalized on Saturday.

Abdallah, the former head of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction (LARF), was convicted for his alleged part in the 1982 murders in Paris of U.S. military attache Charles Robert Ray and Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimantov.

He was handed down a life sentence in 1987. Abdallah has been eligible for parole since 1999, but seven previous applications were all rejected.

A French court granted Abdallah parole in November on condition he be deported but the interior ministry had yet to issue the deportation order. The court postponed its decision on his release until February 28.

Last month, U.S. Representative Grace Meng urged France not to release him, drawing up a bipartisan letter with around 50 members of Congress calling on France to scrap the possible release.

The letter was handed to French President Francois Hollande.

The International Campaign to Free Georges Abdallah has accused Paris of being a proxy for the U.S. But French Ambassador to Lebanon Patrice Paoli has denied any U.S. role in the delay to release him.

The campaign dismantled on January 30 a tent it had erected outside the mission after the Lebanese government tasked a ministerial committee with following up the case.