On Palestinian Prisoners Day 2010, Addameer Reflects On Israel’s Systematic Human Rights Violations against Palestinian Political Prisoners since April 2009
 
On 16 April 2010, the eve of Palestinian Prisoners Day 2010, a Palestinian prisoner suffering from a long-term serious medical condition died in an isolation cell inside an Israeli prison. His passing brings the number of Palestinians killed inside Israeli prisons – either through negligence, systematic ill-treatment or deliberate murder at the hands of prison personnel – since the colonial occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza began in 1967 to approximately 200, not to mention the many Palestinians killed during or immediately following arrest or during transport to detention facilities.
 
Israeli violations against Palestinian political prisoners continue with legal impunity. The last year has seen the continuation of Israel’s policies and techniques of systematic abuse of prisoners and their families, including Israel’s campaign of mass arrest, which must be viewed in the context of the furtherance of its broader policies of colonial expansion and suppression of Palestinian resistance.
 
The Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip from 27 December 2008 to 21 January 2009, a military offensive comprising strikes from air and sea and a ground invasion, resulted in the deliberate and unlawful murder of more than 1,400 Gazan civilians, and continues to have vast housing, health, economic and industrial consequences. During the ground offensive, hundreds of Palestinian civilians were arrested. They were held in deep mud holes dug by Caterpillar bulldozers for three to four days, many without food or clothing, in harsh winter temperatures. Many detainees were also severely beaten and threatened with death, dogs were deployed into the holes to induce fear and to cause injury, and in at least one documented case a soldier urinated on a child who had been captured. The exploitation of Palestinian civilians by Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) soldiers as human shields was also widespread, rendering Palestinian bodies mere objects in a process of grave dehumanization through which Palestinian human life itself becomes obsolete.
 
As the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict found, hundreds of solidarity demonstrators in the West Bank were also violently attacked and arrested by the IOF during the assault on Gaza. In January protests – one in Qalqilya and one in Hebron – two demonstrators were fatally shot by IOF soldiers. Since the end of the assault on Gaza, levels of violence and mass arrests have dramatically escalated in the West Bank and the 1948 territory. Several anti-Wall activists have also been killed by IOF soldiers, more than 100 have been arrested, and many have been injured, in many cases causing severe injury and lasting disability.
 
Arrests have particularly targeted leaders of the anti-Wall movement, in addition to children – a tactic designed to disempower the civil resistance movement (which is gaining considerable international support and attention), deter further activism, and induce heightened levels of fear and psychic violence in communities. Such policies are in clear violation of the right to freedom of expression and peaceful demonstration.(1)
Similarly, in recent months, Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem have been subjected to increasing levels of arrests, detention, harassment, intimidation and other forms of unlawful State violence to deter activism and suppress resistance against Israel’s practices of ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem. In neighborhoods such as Ras al’Amud, Silwan, Wadi al-Joz, Jabal at Tur, Sheikh Jarrah and the Old City, the use of various methods of civil disobedience has intensified in response to illegal Israeli colonial-settlement expansion, restrictions placed on visits to Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the inauguration of the controversial Hurva Synagogue. In an effort to suppress, silence and deter these forms of political objection, Israeli police and the IOF have intensified their systematic and widespread campaigns of incarceration and displacement in East Jerusalem. In March 2010, it is estimated that approximately 160 East Jerusalemites were arrested, numbers higher than in any other district in occupied Palestine.(2)
 
Torture and ill-treatment – both physical and psychological – during arrest, transport, interrogation and detention continues to be widespread. The use of painful stress positions, severe sleep deprivation, protracted interrogation sessions, abusive language and death threats to the detainee and his or her family are commonplace. In addition, gendered violence is frequent, including invasive and/or internal body and strip searches, techniques of culturally and religiously insensitive exposure (the removal of Muslim women’s hijabs and the removal or tearing of clothes, and inappropriate or humiliating photography), and the appropriation of cultural and linguistic norms to degrade and humiliate.(3)
 
Furthermore, despite the issuance of Military Order 1644 by Israeli military authorities in July 2009, the treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military courts remains highly problematic and in frequent violation of international law. Seven Addameer child clients were victims of physical forms of sexual violence during interrogation and transport to detention centers following their arrest. Threats of sexual violence against Palestinian children are almost universally employed by Israeli interrogators and IOF soldiers during transport and under interrogation. Palestinian children arrested by Israeli forces are typically interrogated without a lawyer or family member present and without a video recording of the questioning as is required for children under the age of 18 in the Israeli civil system. As a result, these children are also routinely coerced into giving confessions under threats of violence against their family, and are sometimes forced to become collaborators. However, complaints of torture from children have often resulted in punitive measures such as the imposition of further administrative detention orders. Moreover, Palestinian children are tried as adults at age 16, though the age of majority for Israelis in the civil system is set at age 18. At present, there are approximately 337 Palestinian children as young as 12 held in Israeli detention, of which 39 are under the age of 16, and two are held as administrative detainees.
 
The number of Palestinians subjected to administrative detention dropped from approximately 540 as of 31 March 2009 to 237 as of 31 March 2010.
 
Nevertheless, there has been no comparable improvement in correcting the Israeli laws and policies that enable the unlawful use of this measure.
 
Indefinite detention under administrative detention orders are still made on the basis of ‘secret information’ which the defense is precluded from examining and continues to remove men, women and children from their communities for potentially indefinite periods of time. In 2009, 37 percent of administrative detainees were held between six to 12 months and 33 percent for two years. Twenty-eight prisoners had spent between two and four years continuously in detention, and one of them spent five years under administrative detention. In early 2010, one administrative detainee was released after nearly seven years in administrative detention, interrupted only by a three-month release in 2007. His release was conditional on his ‘voluntary deportation’ (he now resides in Syria). Reports suggest that tactics of blackmail or pressure from Israeli authorities to induce ‘voluntary deportation’ in ‘exchange’ for release from administrative detention are becoming more widespread. Addameer continues its sustained campaign against administrative detention, with the committed support of international activists.
 
Currently, at least 237 Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem are being detained in administrative detention by Israel, of which three are women, two are children under the age of 18 and six are members of the Palestinian Legislative Council. Another seven Palestinians from the Gaza Strip are held as State-sponsored hostages under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law, which allows for their detention until the ‘end of hostilities’.
 
In addition, financial penalties imposed against Palestinians for ‘offenses’ committed while held in Israeli prisons and detention centers increased to an unprecedented level during the past year. In 2009, a total of 30,000 NIS in fines were taken from Palestinian detainees in Ashkelon Prison alone. ‘Offenses’ justifying such fines included using two buckets instead of one bucket to clean a cell.
 
In December 2009, the Israeli High Court of Justice upheld the Israeli government’s absolute prohibition on family visits for Gazan prisoners unilaterally implemented on 6 June 2007, which domestically legalized grave violations of international law guaranteeing the right to family visits, and further entrenched the isolation of Gazan political prisoners and the collective punishment of the Gazan population as a whole. In the West Bank, many families continued to be labeled “security threats”, justifying Israel’s refusal to grant them travel permits so that they too have been punitively precluded from visiting their loved ones incarcerated illegally outside 1967 occupied Palestine. When these family members are allowed to visit, they are subjected to invasive procedures, including internal body searches, at the prison itself and at checkpoints en route to the prison. These are tactics clearly designed to deter families from visiting. Dually transferring Palestinians from occupied territory into Israeli prisons in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and prohibiting Palestinians’ freedom of movement is a deliberate technique of the occupation to divide and isolate Palestinians, and devastate the Palestinian collective psyche.(4)
 
The right to education for Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli detention facilities also remains severely curtailed under the pretext of ‘security’ concerns. In 2008 and 2009 all Palestinian detainees were prevented from undertaking their Tawijhi (final secondary school examinations). In 2009 this affected 1,821 students. Palestinian students are also prohibited from studying science, mathematics, geography or history. This discriminatory policy is implemented on the basis of a 1997 High Court of Justice decision which requires that Palestinian children receive the same level of education as Israeli detainees, subject to limitations where ‘security’ would be affected.(5)
 
Recently inaugurated Israeli military orders 1649 and 1650 broadly expanded the definition of ‘infiltrator’ to include anyone present in the West Bank who does not hold an Israeli permit to reside there, and introduced a new legal procedure of judicial review for those detained pending deportation that creates another de facto system of indefinite detention. Addameer anticipates that these orders will enable a wider scope of deportations, facilitate further arrests and sham prosecutions under criminal infiltrator charges, and result in increased numbers of individuals held in Israeli detention for years without charge or trial. Particularly at risk are the more than 25,000 Gazans living in the West Bank, who may face deportation to Gaza or imprisonment for periods ranging from three years to life in prison. The order is also likely to target international activists and non-naturalized spouses of Palestinian residents. At present, eight Palestinian refugees who have been held in Israeli detention centers without charge or trial for up to eight years pending deportation are set to receive judicial reviews under the new orders. Although it remains to be seen how the order will be implemented in practice, Addameer fears the judicial reviews will only serve to enable the ongoing and indefinite detention of these individuals.
 
More broadly the military courts and the net of more than 1,650 Israeli orders governing the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) continue to work to criminalize all aspects of Palestinian daily life. The military court system operates in direct violation of international law, well outside its prescribed jurisdiction, and utterly precludes the possibility of a fair trial through procedures that enshrine a ‘presumed guilty’ assumption in absolute contravention of international law and rules developed in r ‘developed’ jurisdictions – including in Israel’s civilian courts – where a genuine presumption of innocence is a cornerstone of the very legitimacy of the court. When considering the compounding effects of Israel’s military court system and application of aggressive military orders, it is clear that every Palestinian incarcerated in an Israeli prison has been removed from their community in an effort to destroy the possibility of Palestinian self-determination, to expand Israel’s colonial empire and to continue the ongoing political project of ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
 
 
It must be noted that, at the same time that the military law defines and controls every aspect of daily Palestinian life under occupation, it simultaneously condones the widespread violence perpetrated by settlers against Palestinians, their homes, lands and places of worship because settler activities serve the Israeli colonial enterprise.
 
In observing Palestinian Prisoners Day on 17 April 2010 and all other days, Addameer submits that Israel’s disregard for international and their own standards of basic human decency in regards to Palestinian political prisoners places it in severe violation of international law and requires immediate international intervention and ongoing monitoring. However, the UN and the international community have continually failed in their legal obligations to hold Israel to account. During the UN Secretary-General’s visit to the OPT and Israel on 20-21 March 2010, he failed to meet with the families of female Palestinian prisoners despite a previous pledge to do so. In abruptly cancelling the meeting with these family members, he breached his responsibilities under the UN Charter and the international legal provisions it entails.(6) Moreover, in so doing, he indirectly licensed further willful blindness on the parts of third state actors concerning Israel’s international law violations against Palestinian prisoners. This fosters the very “culture of impunity” that was recently censured by the Goldstone Report.(7) The death of a severely ill prisoner in an Israeli isolation cell in suspicious circumstances on 16 April 2010 is only the latest tragic example of the effect on Palestinian life and death of international inaction in relation to grave human rights abuses.
Despite Israel’s ongoing contravention of domestic and international legal requirements and projects of racial violence, the Palestinian prisoners’ movement continues to be perhaps the most active and united component of Palestinian civil society. In April 2010, Palestinian political prisoners across Israeli prisons launched a month-long of family visits and a four-day hunger strike to protest the ill-treatment of prisoners and their families. Palestinian political prisoners remain resilient in their efforts to resist indignity in prison and to fight for national reconciliation, ending Israel’s colonial regime and achieving Palestinian self-determination.
 
In commemorating Palestinian Prisoners Day 2010, Addameer honors and stands in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners and their families during their month of action and supports the daily struggle of Palestinian political prisoners in their efforts to live dignified lives in prison and to end Israel’s unlawful occupation.
 
Addameer therefore calls on all members of the international community to:
  • Write to your own elected representatives urging them to—
  • Comply with their own international law obligations to take action against Israel which will hold it accountable for its grave violations of international humanitarian and human rights law;
  • Demand that the United States, European Union and United Nations end their economic and diplomatic policies of complicity with Israel’s human rights violations.
  • Join the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement;
  • Join Palestinian political prisoner solidarity groups such as Free Palestinian Prisoners and Sumoud in their grassroots struggles or form solidarity groups in your area;
  • Send letters of support to prisoners at their postal address in prison;
  • Write to your own elected representatives urging them to demand that Israel—
  • Immediately release all Palestinian political prisoners;
  • Return Palestinian political prisoners to occupied territory as required under international law and past bilateral agreements;
  • Immediately cease to employ unlawful measures of  torture, ill-treatment and medical negligence, and administrative detention, which it uses in an illegal manner;
  • Abolish the military law governing the OPT, and respect Palestinians’ right to self-determination, including to devise and enforce their own legal system; and
  • Commence genuine investigations called for by the Goldstone Report and the United Nations Human Rights Council and General Assembly into the alleged war crimes Israel committed during its assault on Gaza and hold all guilty actors accountable.
For more information about Addameer’s work on behalf of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention, please visit our website www.addameer.info, or contact us directly:
 
Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association
P. O. Box: 17338, Jerusalem
Tel: +972 (0)2 296 0446 / 297 0136
Fax: +972 (0)2 296 0447
Email: info@addameer.ps
Website: www.addameer.info
 
1 For further information, see Addameer’s report on the suppression of the anti-Wall movement.
2 An Addameer report analyzing the correlation between Palestinian displacement, incarceration and intersecting forms of human rights violations in East Jerusalem is forthcoming.
3 Addameer’s brochure on Palestinian women political prisoners and their experiences under Israeli detention is due to be released in May. Further information can be found in Addameer’s 2008 report ‘In Need of Protection: Palestinian Female Prisoners in Israeli Detention’, and on Addameer’s Aseerat project website.
4 For further information, see Addameer’s position paper on the abolition of the Gaza Family Visit Programme.
5 An Addameer report on the curtailments on Palestinian children’s right to education in Megiddo, Rimonim, Ofer, Hasharon and Damon Prisons will shortly be published in Arabic.
6 For further details, see Addameer’s statement condemning UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s failure to meet with families of Palestinian political prisoners during his recent visit to the OPT.
7 Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict , para 1366, page 381.