Her husband is the convicted killer some call the Palestinian Mandela
Not long before Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned leader of Fatah, called the largest hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners in recent years, his wife, Fadwa, and daughter Ruba visited him in Hadarim prison, Israel.
“The last time I went to visit him with my daughter was two to three months ago,” recalled Fadwa last week on the 11th day of the strike. “My daughter said to him, ‘I wish you wouldn’t do this. We don’t see you very often. My brothers don’t see you. We will worry about you and not be able to visit.’ He replied: ‘I know it’s going to be painful for the family’.”
Two weeks since it began, the strike by more than 1,000 prisoners in Israeli jails is galvanising Palestinian opinion. On Thursday, the day The Observer spoke to Fadwa in Ramallah, a general strike in support of the prisoners had shuttered shops, offices and schools. Roads were blocked by barricades and there were new posters in the city, depicting the prisoners.
The hunger strike is taking place against a background of rising tension before the 50th anniversary in June of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, not just between Palestinians and Israelis, but between the main Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas.
Read the full article by Peter Beaumont at The Guardian.