Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz, the father of Alwaleed bin Talal and first progressive reformer in the House of Saud, has gone on a hunger strike in protest at the purge being carried out by his nephew Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the detention of three of his own sons, Middle East Eye reported
The 86-year-old prince, who is the half brother of King Salman, stopped eating on 10 November, shortly after his first son, Alwaleed, was arrested on 4 November, and has lost 10 kilos in one month.
Last week, a feeding tube was inserted into him, but his condition at the King Faisal Hospital in Riyadh remains weak, according to several people who have visited him.
It was noted that the prince had made no public statement about his refusal to eat. When his half brother King Salman visited him in late November to express his condolences about the death of their sister, Madawi, the king was pictured kissing the hand of Talal, who was then in a wheelchair.
The visitor said that the prince did not raise the issue of the arrest of his three sons with the king on that occasion because Talal did not want to use his access to the king to press for the release of his sons, while others remained in prison.
As the "The return of Saudi Arabia's Red Prince" article noted, the family of Talal's mother Munayer were most likely Armenian Christians from eastern Anatolia. In 1915, the family had been forced to flee in terror before the vast anti-Armenian massacres of that year. Unlike the hundreds of thousands of Armenians who fled west to Athens or Beirut, Munayer, her father, mother, and two other siblings traveled southward, along old caravan routes, deep into the interior of Wahhabi Arabia. It was a strange choice for a Christian family. They may have been too terrified to reason carefully. Or perhaps they intended to head for Lebanon or even Persia – safe havens then for fleeing Armenians – and simply got lost.