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Video: Jordanian Woman Locked Up in Israel Sent to Hospital After Monthlong Hunger Strike

Jordanian woman Heba al-Labadi was admitted to the Bnei Zion Hospital in the city of Haifa Thursday, after going on a monthlong hunger strike to protest her detention without trial by Israeli officials.
Sputnik

According to a report by The Times of Israel, Labadi, 32, received fluids at the hospital on Thursday and Monday before being sent back to the Kishon Prison in northern Israel where she is being held. She was arrested by Israeli officials on August 20 at the Allenby Bridge that connects the West Bank with Jordan “because of suspicion of her involvement in serious security violations,” according to the Israeli Shin Bet security service.

Labadi has been held in administrative detention for months without any formal charges, with Israeli authorities claiming that she is a danger to the country’s security. 

Labadi’s attorney, Raslan Mahajna, told Haaretz last week that her detainment was related to the fact that she met with a host of the Al-Nour radio station, a Hezbollah media outlet, while visiting her sister in recent months in the Lebanese capital of Beirut. Hezbollah is a militant group based in Lebanon. Israeli officials believe that Labadi was on a mission to the West Bank to recruit Hezbollah operatives, according to Haaretz.

However, Labadi has denied the claims against her, and her family has confirmed that she isn’t a political activist. According to her lawyer, Labadi has been abused, verbally assaulted and tortured by Shin Bet interrogators.

Jordan’s Foreign Ministry demanded Labadi’s immediate release last week in a letter sent to the Israeli embassy in the Jordanian capital of Amman. The Foreign Ministry has also said that Labadi’s hunger strike “makes the need for her immediate release more urgent.”

Demonstrators in East Jerusalem protested Labadi’s detention on Saturday, while left-wing activists also gathered in downtown Tel Aviv on Sunday to protest her incarceration and raise awareness of detainment conditions in Israel, some wearing handcuffs and blindfolds to draw attention to the treatment of security prisoners in Israel, the Times of Israel reported.

“The army must immediately release Heba, who doesn’t even know what she is being accused of,” Aida Touma-Suleiman, an MK who is part of Israel’s Joint List political party, told reporters on Monday outside the Ofer Military Court, which listened to an appeal for Labadi’s release that day, the Times reported. “Administrative detention is a crime.”

Following the hearing, Mahajna said that Labadi’s legal counsel requested that the judges free her and Abdelrahman Maree, another Jordanian being held in administrative detention by Israel, if the two prisoners promise not to enter Israel or the West Bank for 18 months. The court will rule after consulting with the Shin Bet.

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