Billed as a “prominent Palestinian-French human rights lawyer,” Salah Hamouri was recently featured in a report by The Guardian following the announcement that he would go on hunger strike in protest at his detention in Israeli prison.
Hamouri, who works as a field researcher for the Israeli-blacklisted Palestinian NGO Addameer, was sentenced in March to administrative detention over his membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization, which is behind scores of deadly attacks targeting innocent Israelis.
Describing the alleged conditions that sparked Hamouri’s protest in a piece titled, ‘Human rights lawyer in Israeli prison goes on hunger strike,’ The Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent Beth McKernan writes:
Along with 29 other people held in administrative detention in prisons around Israel, Hamouri on Sunday began an open-ended hunger strike to protest against the Israeli practice, which is routinely used against Palestinians who are subject to Israel’s military, rather than civil, justice system.
Negotiations with Israeli officials on Wednesday did not yield results, a member of the #JusticeforSalah campaign said. The human rights lawyer has been moved to a 2 x 2 sq metre isolation cell in Hadarim, a maximum security prison.”
It is only in the eighth paragraph that the reader is given any more details about Hamouri’s chilling background, which includes several spells in prison and a 2005 arrest and subsequent conviction for his role in a terror cell that had plotted to assassinate Israel’s former Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.
Related Reading: Addameer: Why Are Media Ignoring Palestinian NGO’s Fight to Free Terrorists?
Like other news reports about Hamouri (see here and here), The Guardian treats his participation in PFLP activities as mere Israeli claims — an impliedly sneaky way to bypass due process and detain Hamouri alongside others “without charge or access to the evidence against them.”
It is, therefore, an awkward coincidence that on the very same day that The Guardian’s piece was published, the PFLP itself unintentionally confirmed Hamouri’s position within its ranks.
Indeed, far from being an “alleged” terror operative, the official PFLP website did the work of Israeli prosecutors when it included Hamouri’s name on a list of 30 PFLP operatives who are in the “prisons of the Zionist occupation [and] are scheduled to start an open hunger strike.”
The statement from the PFLP corroborating Israel’s charges is particularly embarrassing for the Guardian given that the newspaper has been forced to update this particular story once already to include a quote from the IDF following an overture by CAMERA.
Can we assume that all news reports that refer to “allegations” about Hamouri’s now-confirmed terrorist proclivities will update their stories accordingly?
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Featured Image: ABBAS MOMANI/AFP via Getty Images
