Walid Daqqa

Walid Nimer As'aad Daqqa (; 18 July 1961 – 7 April 2024) was a Palestinian prisoner and novelist who was imprisoned for 38 years after he was convicted of commanding a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)-affiliated group that abducted and killed an Israeli soldier. He was not convicted of the murder, but of commanding the group, a charge he rejected. Daqqa was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails. On 6 August 1984, a group of Arab Israelis affiliated with the PFLP as he got off a bus near his home in the vicinity of Netanya. Tamam was found dead four days later, with "massive" head wounds.

Daqqa was arrested on 25 March 1986 and accused of either being a member or commander, of the PFLP-affiliated group that abducted and killed Tamam. According to Amnesty International, his conviction was based on emergency regulations enacted by British authorities in Mandatory Palestine, which allow for a lower threshold for proof than the criteria used in Israeli criminal law. Daqqa joined Balad in 1996, later serving as a member of the party's Central Committee.

In 1999, while in prison, he married Sanaa Salameh, a lawyer from Tira, His works include The Tale of the Secrets of Oil, Fusion of Consciousness and A Parallel Time. The latter book, together with material from a long letter he had written to former MK Azmi Bishara, The Tale of the Secrets of Oil narrates the story of a 12-year-old boy named Jude, who was conceived with his imprisoned father's sperm. It begins as the boy prepares to meet his father for the first time in prison, but Jude receives news that, "due to security reasons," his visit had been cancelled. Jude, who is heartbroken, goes for a walk in the countryside, engaging in a conversation with different species, including a rabbit, a cat, and eventually an olive tree named Um Rumi, who is 1,500-year-old. They all listen to the boy's frustration over his canceled prison visit, and tell him of their suffering under the occupation and their struggle for freedom. He was due to be released in March 2023 on completion of his sentence, but he had already received a further two years sentence in 2018 for smuggling mobile phones to distribute to other prisoners to contact their families. Amnesty International reported that Daqqa's lawyer who had visited him on 24 March 2024 was "shocked by his sharp weight loss and visible fragility," and accordingly, said that denying prisoners from access to medical care may constitute torture. The day after, the penultimate of Ramadan, with authorities ignoring requests for the release of his body, chairs had been arranged in the garden for visitors bringing condolences. Border police raided the garden and ordered the seats to be taken away. According to Gideon Levy, sitting and mourning were forbidden. By the late afternoon, while the customary mourning tent was being erected, a further police raid took place: the mourners were beaten, shoved aside, with five arrested and the mourning tent was then torn down. The Palestinian Commission of Detainee Affairs stated that Daqqa's death brought the number of Palestinians that have died in Israeli prisons since 1967, when Israel occupied the Palestinian territories, to 251. And his death was the 14th in Israeli custody since the start of the Gaza war on 7 October 2023, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society. Daqqa's body has been retained by the Security Cabinet of Israel due to his prominence in the Palestinian cause. On September 30, 2024, the High Court rejected a petition calling for his body to be released, citing the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People in its decision that a potential prisoner exchange outweighed Daqqa's right to dignity and the family's right to proper burial.

Reactions

Israeli police are reported to have intervened forcefully to disperse visitors who had approached his home in Baqa al-Gharbiyye to pay their respects to his family after his death was announced, arresting five mourners. Daqqa's brother stated that Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli Minister of National Security had delayed the restitution of his body to his family for burial. Ben-Gvir remarked that he was unhappy with his natural death because it was not the "death penalty for terrorists"