Hunger-striking prisoner Muhammed Allan on Thursday regained consciousness following a medically induced coma a day earlier, a lawyer from the Palestinian Authority’s Committee for Prisoner’s Affairs told Ma’an.

Karim Ajwa said that Allan, 31, awoke from a medically induced coma and is currently in critical condition in the ICU at Barzilai Medical Center.

Ajwa added that Allan’s condition had improved slightly, but that his life remains in severe danger.

Doctors at Barzilai have decided to keep Allan in the ICU for several days because he requires intensive treatment in order for his health not to deteriorate further.

“Now he’s awake. He’s very weak,” Dr Chezy Levy, the director of Barzilai hospital, told journalists. “He started to speak with those next to him.”

Asked whether Allan had broken his hunger strike, which began on June 18, Levy said “not yet”.

“Now we are telling him what happened and what were the legal decisions yesterday, in order to convince him to start to get some fluids and some sugar through his stomach and intestines in order to gradually start to feed him normally,” Levy added.

The director of the legal unit at the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, Jawad Boulos, said that doctors at Barzilai confirmed their commitment not to force Allan to intake nutrition outside of the vitamins he is receiving intravenously, which Boulos said does not affect his strike.

Allan has been held since November in a form of internment known as administrative detention, which was temporarily lifted by Wednesday’s ruling.

However, the court said he must remain in hospital pending a final decision on his case.

Allan has been on hunger strike for more than two months in protest of his administrative detention, an Israeli policy that allows detainees to be held without trial or charge for renewable periods of six months,indefinitely. MAANNEWS