 Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. I am Prashant and you're watching Around the World in 8 Minutes, where we bring you news from working class and popular movements across the globe. In our first story, we look at the successful hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. More than 400 Palestinian prisoners ended their mass hunger strike on Monday after Israeli prison service agreed to fulfill their demands. These demands include installing landline phones inside prisons and releasing those kept in solitary confinement, among others. Prison authorities also agreed to reverse the measures they had introduced in February, such as installing mobile reception jamming devices. Prisoners had repeatedly complained of experiencing headaches because of the presence of these devices. A statement by the Prisoners Committee of Islamic and National Faction said, the prisoners movement confirmed that they reached a deal with the Israeli prison service for removing electronic jamming devices and allowing them to have landlines in prison to call their families. The strike of the prisoners began on April 5th and was called Al Karama II, meaning dignity. A statement circulated in the local media had stated that more than 1,500 prisoners, including administrative detainees, were to join the hunger strike in the coming weeks if the demands were not met. The commission of detainees and ex-detainees affairs had on the same day revealed that the Israeli prison service had started transferring hunger strikers from Negev and Ramon prisons to isolation cells and other jails. Prisoners leaders, as well as a Palestinian liberation organization, had recently announced that talks between them and Israeli jail authorities had failed. It is following this that the prisoners decided to refrain from eating any food or even drinking water while on the strike. The striking prisoners demanded that the jails holding Palestinian prisoners provide telephone services like the jails in which the Israeli prisoners are kept. They also demanded that the Israeli prison service remove the mobile phone jammers installed inside the jails. This is due to cancer discs and other health hazards. Prisoners had also been asking for the installation of pay phones inside the jails for a long time. Israel's public security minister, Gilad Erdan, had responded by saying that these installations were necessary to stop terror activity in prisons without any basis or evidence of such activities. Erdan had in January planned to make the living conditions of Palestinian prisoners worse. His plan included rationing water supply reducing the number of family visits, removing cooking rights and revoking the prisoners' access to television. His plan, however, would have required parliamentary approval first. The prisoners also demanded that they be allowed visits from family members at least twice a month. Another demand of the prisoners was the lifting of the new and old punitive measures that Israeli authorities had introduced against all Palestinian prisoners. Those in jail who go on protests and hunger strikes are subjected to harsh treatment from the authorities. This includes being placed in solitary confinement, getting transferred from one prison to another and even being force-fed. The United Nations special rapporteur on the right to health had said in 2015 that under no circumstance will force-feeding of prisoners and detainees on hunger strike comply with human rights standards. Israel currently holds 5,450 Palestinian prisoners including 200 administrative detainees. These are individuals without a charge as per the latest figures from the Jerusalem-based Palestinian prisoners' rights group at Amir. These prisoners are being held in jails in Israel in blatant contravention of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which requires an occupying power to hold prisoners from occupied land within that area. According to rights groups, more than 1,800 inmates are in urgent need of medical care and close to 700 are suffering from serious and chronic illnesses. In our next story, we take you to South Africa where an activist of the Durban-Shackdweller's movement was shot at by unidentified armed men. Siobonga Ngaadi, an activist with the Shackdweller's movement, Abhalali Basse Kanana, was shot at on April 14th by an unidentified armed man. The attack reportedly took place while they were launching their newest branch in the city and celebrating the recent court victories that allowed them to inhabit the land occupation in Ketokrest. This is seen by the activists as the latest round of attacks on Abhalali activists and a retaliation for their recent victories. The police is currently investigating the shooting as a probable murder attempt. This is the second attack on an Abhalali Basse Kanana activist this month since a murder that occurred about two weeks ago in the same occupation. Ngaadi meanwhile is injured and is currently under treatment. This comes barely a month and a half after Abhalali Basse Kanana won a crucial legal battle against the local leaders of the African National Congress and their attempts to clear off the land that they had occupied in Ketokrest. The movement has seen some significant victories and expansion over the past few years but has also been fighting a battle against the city's ANC chapter which controls the municipality. Despite this attack, the inauguration was a major success. In a press statement put out by Abhalali Basse Majandolo, the movement called the incident an armed attack at the Ekhanana land occupation in Ketokrest. The land movement in Ketokrest in Durban was among the first such occupations that became part of a nationwide movement. The land was occupied in 2013 by over 1000 people and was met with severe hostility by the Durban ANC. The occupied land originally called the Marikana land occupation later came to be known as Ekhanana which means a place of hope. On February 13th, the land occupation won a major legal victory at the Durban High Court which protected them from eviction attempts by the Durban Municipality under the ANC. These eviction attempts valid by the municipality's illegal and infamous anti-land invasion unit. Zimuni Ngiba, the local councillor who has railed against the land occupation went against the ANC's leadership decision to drop attempts to evict the people of Ekhanana. He led a group of his followers to squat on the land in an attempt to undermine the court judgment. The court however issued an eviction order against Ngiba and his followers as intruders into the neighbourhood. It later assigned representatives of Abhalali to enumerate the residents to avoid any further encroachment into Ekhanana. The press statement released by Abhalali indicated a possible involvement of Ngiba in the latest attack on its activists. We don't know who is responsible for these shootings, the statement said, but we do know that the local ANC councillor has repeatedly threatened our members in occupation. He has accused our movement of taking what he calls ANC land. The movement nevertheless is unwavering in its determination to move forward with its cause. Speaking to independent online, Abhalali spokesperson Linda Khuleynguni said, our position remains that land must be allocated on the basis of social need and not on a commercial or party political basis. We remain committed to land reform from below, via democratic self-organisation and mobilisation of the oppressed. He added, our position remains that South Africa belongs to all who live in it and not just to the rich or to the ANC. In our last story, we look at the response of intellectuals and activists across the world to the arrest of Julian Assange. Various organisations, journalists, authors, activists and other intellectuals have condemned the arrest of Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London on April 11th. These voices from across the world noted that his detention and the nature of the charges against him is an attack on press freedom and investigative journalism. While the UK government has charged Assange with jumping bail, the US has filed an extradition request on the basis of an indictment under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act CFAA. The extradition hearing will be held on May 2nd. Assange has been charged with being part of a conspiracy to break into a computer belonging to the US government. The case has to do with the time Assange and Chelsea Manning were in communication regarding information revealed by the latter on US war crimes in Afghanistan in Iraq. The conspiracy in the indictment refers to attempts by Assange and Manning to protect her identity as a source, as well as Assange's encouraging Manning to find out more information on US atrocities. Highlighting this fact, a statement by prominent Indian journalists and intellectuals noted that the arrest of Assange was an attack on the very heart of journalism. The statement said, Helping sources protect themselves is an ethical imperative for all journalists. It is also important to recall that the information Chelsea Manning provided exposed war crimes by the US military personnel in Iraq. The best known of these is the video Collateral Murder published by WikiLeaks in 2007. The statement was signed by N. Ram, former editor-in-chief of the Hindu Group of Publications, author and Booker Prize winner Arindati Roy, Gopal Krishna Gandhi, who is the former governor of the state of West Bengal and is also writer, P. Sainath, a prominent journalist and the editor of the People's Archive of rural India, Indira Jai Singh, the former additional Solicitor General of India, and Ropila Thapar, a noted historian. The statement adds, if the US had charged Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing classified material, the legal case would have been no different from charging the New York Times with publishing the Pentagon Papers. So conspiracy and computer fraud and abuse act had to be used to criminalize the conversation and information transmission between a whistleblower and a journalist. Charging Assange with conspiracy bypasses the protection of a law that exists for the press internationally, including the First Amendment in the US. Renowned journalist and filmmaker John Pilger commented upon Assange's arrest saying, the glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right, muscle against the law, indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years. Earlier, Noam Chomsky talked about how global powers came together to silence Assange and stop his work. He said, the Assange arrest is scandalous in several aspects. One of them is just the effort of the governments and it's not just the US government, the British are cooperating, Ecuador of course is now cooperating, Sweden before had cooperated. The efforts to silence a journalist who was producing materials that people in power didn't want the multitude to know about. WikiLeaks was producing things that people ought to know about those in power. People in power don't like that. So therefore, we have to silence it. Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who exposed the Pentagon Papers, also talked about the kind of precedent set by Assange's arrest. This is the first indictment of a journalist and editor or publisher, Julian Assange and if it is successful, it will not be the last. This is clearly a part of President Trump's war on the press, which he calls the enemy of the state. The statement by the Indian journalists also focused on the contributions of Assange. The journalism WikiLeaks and its editor in chief stands for is a journalism of outrage. Outrage against the injustices and atrocities that take place across the world, but always with an eye to factuality, substantiation and precision. That is why it became important for those in power to silence him. Drawing parallels with history, Chomsky said, some of you may recall when Mussolini's fascist government put Antonio Gramsci in jail. The prosecutor then said, we have to silence his voice for 20 years. Can't let it speak. That's Assange. That's Lula. There are other cases. This is one scandal, said Chomsky. All these prominent writers and intellectuals called on people to rise in support of Assange. We demand that Assange be set free immediately. We call upon journalists and readers everywhere to raise our voices against the persecution of independent and fearless journalism, concluded the statement by Indian journalists. It's a day for journalists in general, especially, and everybody who values a free press and not only in this country to join rags here and now to expose and resist the wrongful and in this country unconstitutional abuse of our laws to silence journalists, said Ellsberg. That's all for this episode of Around the World in 8 Minutes. For more stories and videos about people's movements, please check out our website peoplesdispatch.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.