After 38 years in Israeli occupation prisons, Palestinian prisoner Waleed Daqqa has died due to years of medical neglect while in Israeli jails.
Abu Daqqa was scheduled to be released in February last year after completing his jail term, but Israeli authorities extended his sentence for two more years, forbidding him from seeing his only daughter, Milad, whom he and his wife conceived after managing to smuggle his sperm out of prison. He was denied proper treatment for his rare cancer condition, which Israeli occupation authorities neglected.
Amnesty International and many Palestinian and international human rights organizations had demanded the release of Waleed, who suffered from chronic lung disease and bone marrow cancer, citing the medical neglect of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons.
He was taken prisoner on March 25, 1986. On December 18, 2022, he was diagnosed with Myelofibrosis, a bone marrow cancer that can lead to serious complications. In the year 2015, he was diagnosed with Leukemia, a serious blood cancer.
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society announced in a statement that Abu Daqqa died at the Assaf Harofeh Hospital as a result of Israel’s policy of deliberate medical negligence and slow killing of medically vulnerable Palestinians.
Daqqa’s health reportedly deteriorated since March of last year, as a result of a severe pneumonia and acute kidney failure.
The 62-year-old Palestinian prisoner was arrested in 1986 and sentenced to 37 years in prison, which he completed in March 2023.
Israeli authorities, however, extended his sentence by two years in 2017 over charges of smuggling a mobile phone into prison.
Daqqa was a Palestinian writer, activist, and political prisoner from Baqa Al-Gharbiya, a Palestinian town in today’s Israel.
