Imprisoned
Decency
By Arjan El Fassed
20 August 2004
The
Electronic Intifada
Palestinian
prisoners in four different Israeli prisons started an open-ended hunger
strike on Sunday to press for better living conditions of the nearly
8,000 Palestinian prisoners. Israeli authorities reacted to the strike
with disciplinary measures and suspended several of the prisoners' privileges
such as confiscating television sets and radios, suspending newspaper
deliveries and stopping visits.
Since 1967 to date,
Israel has arbitrarily detained over 630,000 Palestinians. In 1989 alone,
Israel detained 50,000 Palestinians, representing 16% of the entire
male population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip between the ages of
14 and 55. By way of comparison, that same year, out of a total African
population of 24 million in South Africa, no more than 5,000 or 0.2%
were detained for security offenses against the apartheid regime. Over
200 Palestinian prisoners have died while in Israeli custody, due to
torture, ill-treatment, deprivation of medical treatment, and neglect.
Israel has systematically
tortured and ill-treated approximately 80% of all Palestinian detainees.
Methods of torture used by the State of Israel include both psychological
and physical torture, including beatings of sensitive organs, choking,
pulling of hair off the body, prolonged solitary confinement, subjecting
Palestinian detainees to noise, screams, and threats against their families.
Other forms of torture
and ill-treatment applied by Israel against Palestinian detainees include
forcing a person to stand, hooded and handcuffed, for long periods of
time, while depriving him of food or sleep, starvation, the use of electric
shocks, burnings, beatings with hands, fists, truncheons, and boots,
deprivation of food, sleep, and basic hygiene, resulting in lice and
general discomfort, and forcing detainees to stand for protracted periods
of time. In the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel has established
military courts that do not comply with fair trial standards.
In the past few
years, Israel's occupation army has rounded up thousands of Palestinian
men and boys. This figure includes today 370 Palestinian children (under
the age of 18) and 103 Palestinian women and girls. Their conditions
of detention are extremely poor, and in some cases, life-threatening.
Between September 2000 to the end of June 2003 approximately 2,000 Palestinian
children have been arrested and detained. Children as young as 13 are
held in Israeli prisons with children aged 13 and 14 constituting approximately
ten percent of all child detainees. Almost all child detainees have
reported some form of torture or mistreatment. Children are routinely
held in detention centers under appalling conditions: in some centers
up to eleven children have been packed into cells as small as five square
meters.
They have been taken
to detention centres both inside and outside the occupied Palestinian
territories. These detention centres do not even meet the minimum standards
of treatment, presenting a real threat to the lives of detainees. Thousands
of prisoners have been exposed to ill-treatment and torture.
The dominant interrogation
method is a coordinated, rigid and increasingly painful regime of physical
constraints and psychological pressure applied over several days, and
often for weeks at a time, on detainees who are held without charge
and usually without access to a lawyer. The chief methods included prolonged
sleep deprivation, the use of blindfolds or tight-fitting hoods, shackling
or otherwise forcing detainees in body positions that grow increasingly
painful, prolonged toilet and hygiene deprivation, and verbal threats
and insults. Many detainees are also beaten during rounds of questioning.
Only one month ago,
Newsweek reported on Israel's secret torture facility 1391, which was
used for prisoners rounded up during the Israeli military assault on
Jenin in April 2002. Facility 1391 has been airbrushed from Israeli
aerial photographs and purged from modern maps.
An article written
by Boston Globe reporter Dan Ephron, somehow exposed the existence of
facility 1391. However, the existence of this facility was already noted
by human rights organizations and appeared on the pages of the Israeli
newspaper Ha'aretz and the Guardian. For uncertain reasons news was
not taken up by other major media. On September 1, 2003, an article
in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, "Inside Israel's Secret Prison"
provided gruesome details about Israel's "Abu Ghraib". This
secret detention and interrogation center is reportedly located in the
north of Israel, close to the main road between Hadera and Afula.
One former inmate
has filed a lawsuit saying that he was raped twice - once by a man and
once with a stick - during questioning. Most of those who emerge complain
about the psychological torture of solitary confinement in filthy, blackened
cells so poorly lit that inmates can barely see their own hands, and
with no idea where they are or, in many cases, why they are there.
Inside other Israeli
prisons, Palestinian prisoners frequently report attacks by prison guards
including the firing of tear gas inside prisoner's cells, beatings,
denial of food and medical treatment and long periods of solitary confinement.
Women prisoners report that they have been stripped naked by prison
guards and shackled spread-eagled to prison beds in solitary confinement.
They also reported severe abuse during interrogation. Israeli prison
guards regularly burst into the prisoners' rooms, cut the electricity,
shoot tear gas, shut the windows and attack the prisoners. Papers, books
and other belongings are confiscated.
A large number of
Palestinian prisoners are in urgent need of medical treatment and yet
receive little more than basic pain relievers. Prisoners report that
provision of medical treatment is often used as another form of coercion
against them by the prison authorities. Israel continues to arrest and
torture Palestinian children at an unprecedented rate.
Family visits to
Palestinian prisoners have been almost impossible since the beginning
of the Intifada. When these visits have occurred, family members are
forced to undergo a series of humiliating and invasive checks prior
to their admittance to the prison where their relative is being held.
Prisoners are prevented from communicating with their families by phone.
Letters are permitted but cannot be sealed and can be read by the administration
at any time.
About half of the
nearly 8,000 Palestinian prisoners are being detained without charge.
The vast majority of Palestinian prisoners are political prisoners who
have been arbitrarily imprisoned or detained for no legitimate security
reason, but for political expression or simply because they are Palestinian.
Last month, Israel's
Public Defender's Office criticised prison conditions in Israeli detention
centers. It found these centers overcrowded, violent and unsanitary,
with many prisoners having to eat and sleep on bare floors.
To protest these
abhorrent conditions Palestinian prisoners commenced their hungerstrike
last Sunday. Yet, Israeli Internal Security Minister Tzahi Hanegbi said
that the prisoners would not win the battle of wills and told a news
conference that the prisoners could even starve to death, as far as
he was concerned. Such comments must be taken seriously and prisoners
must be protected against policies that such comments might entail.
No issue symbolizes
Israel's denial of freedom to Palestinians better than that of political
prisoners. Palestinians have been subjected to the highest rate of incarceration
in the world - approximately 20 percent of the Palestinian population
in the occupied Palestinian territories has, at one point, been arbitrarily
detained or imprisoned by Israel.
Israel's treatment
of Palestinian prisoners is a manifestation of its failure to respect
human rights. Administrative detention and imprisonment inside Israel
are illegal under international humanitarian law. Israel's failure to
release Palestinian political prisoners and its continued arbitrary
arrest of Palestinian civilians only serves to highlight that Israel
continues to view itself above the law and the Palestinians beneath
it.
Arjan El Fassed
is one of the founders of the Electronic Intifada.