JAILED Palestinian author Walid Dakka has been threatened by his Israeli captors with harsher punishment if he publishes a book written while serving his sentence.

The political prisoner has spent 33 years behind bars in Israeli prisons for resisting the occupation of Palestine and was previously punished for writing The Story of the Secret of Oil.

According to the Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS) Mr Dakka has been threatened with solitary confinement if his latest book is published.

His relatives have been barred from visiting him for two months and prison authorities have confiscated his books and fined him. The author had previously been moved between prisons because of his writing.

A lawyer for the PPS said that authorities were angry that Mr Dakka had managed to write a book while in prison and blamed themselves for a failure to monitor him sufficiently.

PPS director Qaddoura Faris condemned the action taken against Mr Dakka and warned that Israel was “waging a war against him for his writing.”

Mr Dakka was first arrested in 1986 and has served 33 years of a 39-year sentence handed down by an Israeli court. He is one of the longest-serving Palestinian political prisoners with Israeli citizenship and is classified as a “security prisoner.”

Israel has continued to clamp down on artists who oppose the occupation.

Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour was released from prison last month after spending three years under house arrest and a six-week spell in prison after she posted a video of herself reading her poem Resist, My People, Resist on YouTube and Facebook in 2015.

She had been charged with incitement to violence and supporting terror.