Barghouti Punished for Calling on Palestinians to End Cooperation with Israel
Jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti has been placed in solitary confinement for a week after calling for the Palestinians to end all cooperation with Israel, the prisons authority said.
"Marwan Barghouti was placed in solitary confinement on Sunday, for a period of a week," spokeswoman Sivan Weizman told Agence France Presse, saying he would not be able to receive visits, and that he would be barred from the prison cafeteria for a month.
"These measures were taken following Marwan Barghouti's recent political appeals," she said in reference to a letter he wrote which was made public on March 26 to mark the 10-year anniversary of his arrest.
"I call on the Palestinian Authority to end all forms of cooperation -- security and economic -- with the occupation," he wrote.
He also urged the Palestinian leadership not to enter negotiations with Israel unless they were based on the 1967 lines and without an Israeli end to settlement activity.
Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences for his role in several deadly anti-Israeli attacks, is being held in Hadarim prison near the coastal resort town of Netanya, north of Tel Aviv.
He has been punished on several occasions in the past for having a mobile phone in his cell, the spokeswoman said.
In January, he was placed in solitary as punishment for making a series of remarks to the press during a rare court appearance in which he urged the Palestinians to pursue peaceful resistance against the Israeli occupation.
A lifelong activist who supported the Oslo peace process in the 1990s, Barghouti is widely believed to have masterminded the second Palestinian intifada that erupted in 2000.
He was arrested in April 2002 and sentenced two years later.
Barghouti has since said he never supported attacks on civilians inside Israel and in recent years has thrown his support behind peaceful resistance.
Source: Agence France Presse
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