Responding to the death in custody of Walid Daqqah, a 62-year-old Palestinian writer who was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails after having spent 38 years imprisoned, Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns said:

“It is heart-wrenching that Walid Daqqah has died in Israeli custody despite the many calls for his urgent release on humanitarian grounds following his 2022 diagnosis with bone marrow cancer and the fact that he had already completed his original sentence.

“Even on his deathbed, Israeli authorities continued to display chilling levels of cruelty against Walid Daqqah and his family, not only denying him adequate medical treatment and suitable food, but also preventing him from saying a final goodbye to his wife Sanaa Salameh and their four-year-old daughter Milad. Walid’s death means that he was only allowed to see his daughter Milad once in person in October 2022, after a daunting legal battle.”

On 25 March 1986, Israeli forces arrested Walid Daqqah, then 24, a Palestinian citizen of Israel. In March 1987, an Israeli military court sentenced him to life imprisonment after convicting him of commanding the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)-affiliated group that had abducted and killed Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984. Daqqah was not convicted of carrying out the murder himself, but of commanding the group, an accusation he always rejected, and his conviction was based on British emergency regulations dating back to 1945, which require a much lower standard of proof for conviction than Israeli criminal law.