Security prisoner Valid Daka died of cancer this evening (Sunday) at Assaf Harofeh Hospital. This morning Deka was evacuated unconscious from the Shavas medical facility in Ramla where he was being held – and this evening he was pronounced dead. Deka, 62 years old at the time of his death, was an Israeli citizen residing in Akka al-Gharbiyya who was arrested in 1986 after participating in the squad that kidnapped and murdered the soldier Moshe Tamm in 1984. All the requests that Daka submitted over the years for early release due to his medical condition were met with opposition from the state, and a special committee regarding life prisoners rejected his request to be released on the grounds that his conviction for terrorism does not allow this.
Deka was sentenced to life imprisonment and his sentence was set at 37 years. He ended up agreeing to it, but in 2017 he was sentenced to two more years in prison following his conviction for smuggling mobile phones into Katziot prison, with the assistance of then MK Basil Getas from Balad. He is considered one of the main security prisoners in the Israeli prison.
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The family of the soldier Moshe Tamm in court, at a hearing about a play that unfolded the story of Deka, in 2015 Photo: Rami Shloush
The family of the soldier Moshe Tamm in court, at a hearing about a play that unfolded the story of Deka, in 2015 Photo: Rami Shloush
In May of last year, Deka submitted his last request for early release due to his illness. About a month later, the parole board decided that his request would be forwarded to the special board for life prisoners – whose requirements are stricter. The Shavas medical officer estimated that Deka’s days were few and that his life was in real danger, but the state opposed his release. The committee determined that it did not have the authority to discuss Deka’s request because he should still be considered a life prisoner.
Apart from the opinion of the Shavas medical officer, several other opinions estimated that Deka would die within two years – and indeed this happened. The legal advisor and the attorney’s office opposed the release request on the grounds that his medical condition does not meet the definition of “his days are numbered”, and argued that in any case there is no to release him due to being a terrorist convicted of murder, and hence he is not entitled to early release, whatever his medical condition may be.
In 2014, the Al-Midan Theater in Haifa staged a play called “The Parallel Time”, and dealt with a minute. The staging of the play and the reactions to it led to its removal from the cultural basket, the denial of the theater’s budget and a fight in the Supreme Court. In the end, the theater’s petition for the payment of the support funds from the Ministry of Culture was rejected. In 2017, then Culture Minister Miri Regev said: “We will not finance a theater that supports terrorism.” In 2019, the theater closed.
