Later in the day, Israeli tanks fired on Hamas sites in Gaza, followed by 22 more rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. The afternoon barrage hit a construction site in the southern city of Sderot, and at least three people were evacuated with shrapnel wounds.
Adnan’s death comes during a period of intensifying violence in the West Bank and across Israel. Israel’s government — which is the most hard-line in the country’s history and includes several prominent settler leaders — has cracked down on Palestinian militants while advancing policies to expand its occupation of the West Bank. Since January, Israeli security forces and settlers have killed at least 95 Palestinians; at least 17 Israelis and one foreign national have died in Palestinian attacks.
Although based in Gaza, Islamic Jihad has attracted a greater following in the West Bank in recent years, especially among young residents disillusioned by the enduring Israeli occupation and the aging and corrupt leadership of more mainstream groups.
“The Palestinian people will not stand silent against the killing of Khader Adnan,” Muna Qadaan, a 51-year-old former prisoner and neighbor of Adnan’s, told The Washington Post.
She said that Itamar Ben Gvir, the far-right national security minister in charge of Israeli prisons, had for months been threatening to worsen conditions for Palestinian detainees, prompting calls for a new mass hunger strike. “The death of Khader Adnan will be a turning point inside the prisons,” she added.
In February, Ben Gvir, vowing to halt the “benefits and indulgences” granted to Palestinians held on terrorism-related charges, ordered detention facilities to close prisoner-run bakeries and to limit shower time to four minutes.
Israel has also increased the use of what it calls administrative detention, in which those accused of terrorism are held indefinitely, denied trial and refused information about the charges against them.
In April, more than 1,000 people were held under administrative detention, compared with 526 people one year earlier, according to the Israeli human rights group HaMoked. It is the highest number since 2003, during the height of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising.
Adnan, who once called on his fellow militants to be “the next person to fire bullets, the next to have his body parts blown all over,” was held 12 times in administrative detention and undertook at least five hunger strikes. In several cases, the tactic worked, resulting in his release from custody, said Orit Adato, a former commissioner of the Israel Prison Service.
Since Adnan’s successful 66-day strike in 2011 to 2012, thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons have refused food and water to protest their incarceration.
The Israel Prison Service said in a statement that Adnan had been charged with “membership in a terrorist organization, support for terrorism and incitement,” and that he refused to undergo medical tests or receive treatment while awaiting trial. He was found unconscious in his cell early Tuesday, the statement said, at which point he was transferred to an Israeli hospital, where he was declared dead.
Jamil Khatib, Adnan’s attorney, denied that he had refused treatment, telling Israel’s Army Radio on Tuesday that his family and several human rights organizations had in recent days “warned that he needed to be hospitalized. … All the studies into this issue show there is an actual danger of death after 75 days [on a hunger strike].”
Lina Qasem-Hassan, chairwoman of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, examined Adnan last week, publishing a medical report on his life-threatening condition and the need for an immediate hospital transfer.
“Khader Adnan chose a hunger strike as a last resort, a nonviolent means of protest against the oppression of himself and his people,” the group said in a statement.
Hunger strikes are seen by many Palestinian prisoners as their only tool to wield power in a system designed to deprive them of legal recourse. Adnan is the first hunger striker to die since 1992.
Since 1967, 237 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons, according to the Prisoners’ Information Office, a prisoners’ organization based in Gaza City.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said in a post on Facebook that Adnan’s death was a “deliberate assassination, made by way of refusing his request to release him, neglecting him medically, and keeping him in his cell despite the seriousness of his health condition.”
In Adnan’s home village of Arraba, near Jenin, male neighbors filed into the mourning hall Tuesday as automatic rifles were fired into the air. A block away, where Adnan’s family lives in front of his bakery, men and women climbed the stairs to pay their respects.
“Your tragedy is our tragedy,” a man told Randa Mousa, Adnan’s widow, her moist eyes visible behind a white veil.
Her husband did not intend to die, Mousa said, and had been willing, toward the end, to accept medical aid offered by rights groups.
“He did not trust the prison doctors,” she said. “They knew beyond a doubt about his condition. They wouldn’t let me see him, his children see him, his attorney see him.”
At his last court appearance, Adnan drifted in and out of consciousness, Mousa recalled. Among his last words to her were, “I can’t hear and I can’t see.”
Adnan’s wife appealed for mourners to avoid violence. “We don’t want any bloodshed,” she said.
Rubin reported from Tel Aviv and Hendrix and Taha from Arraba.