 Over a dozen Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have gone on a hunger strike against their administrative detention. What are their demands? Venezuela has won a lawsuit to recover frozen assets worth over $1.5 billion from Portugal. Why was the country denied this money all these years? This is the Daily Debrief. These are our stories for the day. So do keep watching and if you're watching this on YouTube, don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Our first story is from Palestine where over a dozen prisoners have gone on a hunger strike. They're protesting their illegal detention. We have talked about this administrative detention whereby Israel can hold Palestinians for months on end in jail without charge or trial. The number of administrative detainees has rapidly increased in recent months. To understand some of these issues, we go to Abdul. Abdul, thank you so much for joining us on this show. We have often talked about the question of Palestine, the question of administrative detention, and in fact the struggles of Palestinian prisoners who have been very defiant. So could you maybe tell us, take us a bit through what this latest hunger strike is about and what are the demands? Basically administrative detainees and there is a difference between administrative detainees and prisoners, basically which we can talk about later, but primarily are on hunger strike. Some of them are there for or hunger strike for more than two weeks now, but some of them have joined recently. So you can say there is a relay with which more and more Palestinian administrative detainees are joining their independent hunger strike, basically demanding the end of their administrative detention and also representing the demands of the rest of the Palestinian prisoners, which have basically suffered because of the Israeli prison conditions, bad Israeli prison conditions, but treatment of the Palestinian have been in human and had been reported many times before. How particularly when we became the police minister in Israel, the extremist minister, basically he has passed certain orders, which basically deprived Palestinian prisoners in general of certain basic rights of hygiene, meeting with relatives and so on and so forth. So demanding the restoration of all rights to the prisoners in Palestine and their immediate release from release of the administrative detainees from the prison. These are, you can say, two major demands with which more than a dozen of Palestinians are on the independent hunger strike. When we talk about administrative detention, the difference between administrative detention and general prisoners in Israel, in Israel is basically talking about the prisoners who have who are basically arrested without and kept in prison without being charged or tried for more than six months. And this six months is a period which is extendable several times. So some of them who are on hunger strike are therefore they're inside the Israeli prison for more than a year now, and some of them are even there for more than many years, for many years also. So this is the primary issue at this moment when we talk about the right up to that that makes a lot of sense. And I just want to also talk about the larger question of administrative detention you described on the details. But I think this is also historic high in the number of people who are administrative detainees right now. And could you maybe also take us through some of the policies that the general nature of this government rather, which is actually contributed. We know that administrative detention is only one part of the violence. There are also the attacks on places like Janine, the raids on Gaza. Could you also maybe take us through the larger political situation that is spurring this increase in the number of administrative detentions? Exactly. You see, this year already, this is only the eight month of the year. And the Israeli authorities have issued according to the Palestinian Agency, more than 1900 orders of administrative detention. And at this moment, there are more than 1200 Palestinians who are arrested under the preventive administrative detention. So you can see this is the historically high number. This, of course, there has always been 100 or 200 Palestinians who have been arrested under administrative detention in the past. But ever since this new government, the ultra-right wing government led by Netanyahu, but also backed by settlers like Ben Guir and Smolterich and others, basically represents the most extreme Zionist elements in Israel who have completely denied the existence of Palestinians and their right to self-determination. And even some of them have denied their basic human rights and said it in public domain. So ever since this government has come to power, the numbers are increasing every month or every year. In fact, this month, more than 370 people have been arrested under administrative detention. So, yeah, so when we say that what is the larger nature of administrative detention, this is one of the few laws. Israel is one of the few countries in the world which has a system. Despite the fact that the international human rights groups and even the UN has uttered that this amounts to illegality in terms of business rights. This basically violates basic human rights. This also amounts to some kind of violation of the laws related to occupation. Despite all those comments made by the international human rights agencies and groups, Israel continues to practice. And as I said before, the number of people who are arrested under administrative detention is increasing. So you can see that this Israeli administration and particularly this Israeli administration feels complete lack of accountability, complete community when it comes to daring to basic rights which are which is required even under occupation. And that is the reason that the practices like administrative detention are increasing. If you just see, and by the way, this hunger strike is not for the first time that Palestinian prisoners are moving. There had been different other instances in the past where dozens of Palestinian prisoners have sat on a different hunger strike. Some of them have also died. That also shows, for example, this year in May, one of the prisoners died after being on a hunger strike for more than 87 days. And Israeli administration refused to acknowledge his demands and basically take care of his condition, particularly his condition. So, of course, every Palestinian prisoner has the right to protest that administrative detention, but it also should be noted that Israel has often ignored such protests and that has led to the death of dozens of Palestinians in the past. So that is one aspect of it. The another important aspect is, as I said before, when we, ever since when we came to power, ever since when we became minister under Netanyahu government last year, he has basically started a kind of verification campaign against all the Palestinian prisoners, calling them terrorists without any legal proof and kind of carrying out a campaign that all of them, those who are in the prison, need not to be released. They should never be released from prison. They need to, he has said it, it sounds it sounds absurd, but he has said that they need to be kept in the prison until they die. So this kind of inhuman regime, which is there in Israel, in that context, Palestinian prisoners taking, taking out independent hunger strikes, taking out their protests and carrying their independent hunger strikes shows that how determined they are in resisting the occupation, no matter how brutal the occupation is. Thank you, Abdul for shining light on that very important struggle that is taking place in Israeli jails by Palestinian prisoners. It has been going on for quite a long time and it does look like that determination you talked about is still very much there. Thank you so much. We next go to Venezuela where the legitimate government of President Nicolas Maduro won a lawsuit filed against the Portuguese bank Novo Banco in Lisbon and it recovered more than US dollars 1.5 billion in assets. These assets had been frozen in 2019 at the height of the US led campaign to bring regime change to Venezuela. Anish describes how the money belonging to the people of Venezuela was frozen and its impact. Anish, thank you so much for joining us. So could you maybe first take us through some of the details of the case that's quite a lot of money that belongs to legitimate government of Venezuela. So why were they denied? Why were they blocked from accessing it? Well, the simplest reason here is that there were US sanctions and it's basically on the directive of the US sanctions that the bank Novo Banco actually froze the funds to begin with and because obviously the bank itself has a majority state by US financing corporation. And so pretty much that was the reason that was given. It was also primarily partly because of obviously Portuguese being part of the EU blog that also imposed sanctions on the Venezuelan government. And we have to remember that until recently, since 2019, with governments, these two governments and like many of the Western governments at the time actually held a very tenuous and a very problematic position of not recognizing the legitimate government that obviously comes out of Nicolas Maduro and instead trying to recognize Juan Guaido as the president of being somebody who is not even in Venezuela at the time of being supposedly elected. And so this was the whole situation that existed. And pretty much this was this is just one part of what the Venezuelan government often calls a hybrid war that was waged against it from multiple quarters. And freezing of funds was just one part of it. There were also freezing of complete entire assets. There were over close to a thousand refineries in North America that were just completely cut off from you know, Venezuela's PDVSA. And we also have situations where obviously we have reported this, the gold over $1.5 billion dollars worth of gold reserves being held captive essentially by the Bank of England, even at a time when the government there has started, you know, has dropped Guaido as you know, this recognized president of Venezuela and have started, you know, dealing with the Maduro government. So we are looking at a continuing war of not just sanctions, but also this sort of embargo, an economic embargo that has been put up where obviously Venezuela being a very export at the before sanctions was an export oriented economy, resource oriented economy. And obviously it will have multiple assets across different banks, much like any other country with a similar economic system. And so they made use of that to actually hold the entire economy and its people captive at a time when they actually needed it. And we also need to remember that these funds that in Ivanka was actually part of the deal between the opposition, the right wing opposition and the Venezuelan government to actually kick start, you know, a program to, you know, recover an economic recovery program that can actually, you know, maybe recover some of the damages that were inflicted during the pandemic. And obviously the fact that the sanctions were, you know, exacerbated the situation there. So this is the entire context that we are looking at. And obviously this victory comes as a major, a victory for the Venezuelan government, which is obviously fighting similar legal battles for its funds, for its, you know, reserves in different countries. Ranaesh, interesting you mentioned that because I think that if you look at 2019, when you're talking about, you know, Juan Guaido's self proclaimed declaration of a declaration of himself as a self proclaimed president, the kind of sanctions that the United States and all their allies imposed the attempt to take the Venezuelan embassy in the US, for instance, by Guaido's activists. And nearly four years down the line, you see that almost every element of that strategy has failed. There's a lot of regional integration. There is a lot of, you know, Venezuela is very much back in the center of politics of diplomatic relations in Latin America. And of course the US continues to apply very horrific pressure, but that campaign seems to really not worked at all in some senses. Yes, I think the primary purpose of this campaign was basically to cripple not just the Venezuela economy, but also punish its people for choosing a government that the West did not like. And that was primarily the reason why the Central Sanctions existed. They were pretty much aware that it was like, even if you look at a history of sanctions, doesn't really affect the elite or the people that they supposedly intend to target, it actually affects the bottom poor of any economy or any country. And it actually affects, you know, access to, you know, means of livelihood, access to essential goods, medicines, you know, all sorts of things that actually is necessary for any, you know, civilized world society to continue to be, you know, continue living, forget about prospering. So this is something that they were very well aware of. And we saw that barbarity of that sort of sanctions during the COVID-19 pandemic when there were, you know, even refusal to, for months actually, refusal to even allow medical supplies or, you know, encourage medical supplies to actually reach Venezuela, which desperately needed them, you know, at the time. And this sort of, you know, situation was exacerbated, like obviously Venezuela was going through a crisis of its own. It was going through some level of crisis of, you know, of multiple reasons. But the fact that these sanctions, these artificially created crisis hit it, it actually brought it back behind on several aspects and especially, you know, prevented its start of pandemic efforts. So this was primarily an attempt to obviously, you know, punish a people, a nation for something, for a political decision that may even change tomorrow. They do not know that, but definitely they do not care for that. They do not care for what the people might or might not do tomorrow. They wanted some, they wanted the results and they didn't get it. And that was the kind of outcome that we saw. But definitely that did not work because obviously the government was not built on very shaped grounds. The government was, you know, rock solid. It had constitutional banking and the right-wing opposition did not have this level of popular support and backing that, you know, the government or President Maduro had. And that is something, and obviously the fact that Baidu was pretty much a non-political non-entity back in Venezuela and was only known even to most Venezuelans after he declared himself as president was something that the West did not really understand at that point or probably understood it was only planting, obviously, on their part to think that they could actually, you know, make a country near before them just like the way they used to work physically during the Cold War era or, you know, even the post-Cold War period of whatever the Unicola world ordered that existed. So that obviously, so the fact that this court case happened and the ruling happened clearly shows that that is definitely not going to work any longer. And, you know, the Maduro government is already talking about how, you know, they are going to further pursue litigation to see if the bank and the government of Portugal were well aware of the kind of damage that it will do to its people and might even offer litigation on those grounds. It might also go use that as grounds for their litigation against the Bank of England or their frozen gold reserves and obviously against the United States where, you know, multiple hundreds and hundreds of refineries are being held essentially captive and being taken over and in some cases even confiscated by the United States government completely illegally and pretty much nothing is being done about it other than the fact that Venezuela has to voice its position. So these factors will obviously come in handy. This ruling definitely comes in handy in the future struggle of Venezuela, the people and the government obviously. Ranish, thank you so much for talking to us about that and like we discussed while, of course, the campaign, the US-led campaign must has failed. We need to remember, like you said, that reports say tens of thousands of additional deaths taking place due to these sanctions, people's families, livelihoods, all of them getting affected so severely. So I think these are aspects that can never be forgotten. So thank you so much for talking to us. And that's all we have today in this weekend edition of Daily Debrief. We'll be back on Monday with more stories from across the world, more updates. Do go to a website, peoplesdispatch.org. Visit our YouTube channel to see videos from around the world and don't forget to hit that subscribe button.