The Israeli military occupation renewed the administrative detention without charge or trial of Palestinian writer and land defender Abdul Razeq Farraj, 53, for the fifth consecutive time on 24 June. The new 4-month administrative detention order without charge or trial extends Farraj’s imprisonment; he has been held since 25 February 2014, consistently without charge or trial, on the basis of secret evidence, one of over 400 Palestinians so held.
Farraj, a writer and journalist, is also the administrative and financial director of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), a Palestinian agricultural and land defense organization that won the United Nations’ 2014 Equator Prize for its work on food sustainability. The UAWC has been, for over 28 years, in the forefront of supporting Palestinian agricultural workers and connecting with other land defenders around the world; it is a member of Via Campesina and has worked with the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil. He was arrested for the first time in 1985 and spent six years in Israeli jails; arrested again in 1993 and held for 4 1/2 years, and has been held under administrative detention multiple times since 2002. A Palestinian refugee, his family lives in Jalazone refugee camp near Ramallah.
Farraj is married with two sons; his older son Basil, a graduate of Earlham College, has written on multiple occasions about his experiences being forcibly separated from his father by the Israeli occupation.
Farraj was part of last year’s open hunger strike of administrative detainees.