Prison Conditions In The Occupied Territories
Prison Conditions in the Occupied Territories
by Steve Ghannam
"Under our military rules, we can arrest and hold prisoners without permitting them to see a lawyer. Nor are we required to hold court proceedings. Under these conditions, in which we report only to ourselves, are you surprised to hear that there is torture? How else do you suppose we keep more than a million people subdued, if not by torture."
This quote was made by an Israeli military official in a 1983 interview with the November 29th Committee on Palestine and was published in the committee's brochure entitled: "Human Rights Violations of Palestinian and Lebanese Political Prisoners." It offers some insight into the brutal reality faced daily by Palestinians in the Occupied Territories at the hands of the Israeli occupiers, as well as the dilemma faced by the Israelis in attempting to control the lives of another people.
Since 1967, over 300,000 Palestinian men, women, and children have been imprisoned for violating one of the over 1,100 Israeli military orders. The majority of these orders have never been published or posted in the occupied territories and are not available even to lawyers. The orders range from travel restrictions (not being able to stay overnight inside Israel), to the prohibition of wearing or displaying the colors of the Palestinian flag.
Before the current uprising (which has jailed 10-15,000 Palestinians) over 3,500 Palestinians were held as prisoners of conscience in Israeli prisons. Of those; 1,000 were serving long-term sentences (25 years to life), another 1,000 were serving ten to fifteen years, and the remainder were serving one month to ten year sentences. These figures do not include the many (an estimated 20,000 each year) who are routinely arrested without warrant, detained and interrogated for months at a lime, and finally released without ever having been charged. Most males over the age of sixteen have been interrogated and held at one time or another in their lives for periods of varying duration.
In all of the territories under Israeli occupation, any soldier or police officer has the right to detain an individual for whom there are "grounds to suspect" that he or she has committed an offense. The law does not specify the nature of the suspected offense, and often times Palestinians do not know why they have been arrested and detained.
Upon arrest for suspicion, a Palestinian may be detained for an 18-day period which can be renewed indefinitely. Lawyers are routinely denied access to the detainees before interrogation is complete. Israeli lawyers claim that the reason for this arrangement is that the focal point of interrogation is to obtain a confession. To achieve that end the authorities invariably subject a prisoner to isolation, torture and subhuman physical conditions.
Conditions of overcrowding in Israeli prisons are some of the worst in the world. The world average space allotment is eight square meters per prisoner, while the Israelis allot only one square meter per Palestinian prisoner. Al-Fara'a Dentention Center, designed exclusively for short-term detention and interrogation of young men, has 20-square meter cells which hold 30 prisoners each. Three by six meter tents which hold 50 prisoners each, contain the prisoner overflow. Jnaid, the new maximum security prison opened in June of 1984, holds 25 prisoners per 30-square meter cell.
In both al-Fara'a and Jnaid, some political prisoners are held in these cells for 22 hours a day. Other political prisoners are forced to produce military equipment for the Israeli army. Food in Jnaid is served through the cell door, and prisoners must crouch in the 80-centimeter-wide space between bunk beds to eat. Windows are blocked with asbestos (see OCCUPATION PRISONS, page 11)- (Occupation Prisons, from page 6) (a known carcinogen) "screens," through which no light or air penetrates. The two hour exercise period is held in a 290-square meter asphalt courtyard crammed with 150 prisoners at a time.
Such methods employed by the Israelis have prompted a series of investigations by Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organizations. A now-famous five month investigation wasconducted in 1977 by the London Sunday Times into the use of torture in Israeli prisons. The study documented the cases of 44 Palestinian prisoners from 1967-1977 (the first 10 years of Israeli occupation). It examined practices in seven detention centers: Nablus, Ramallah, Khalil (Hebron), and Gaza; the interrogation and detention center in Jerusalem known as the Russian Compound or Moscobiya; and special military centers located in Gaza and Sarafund.
The invesligation found that Israeli interrogators routinely ill-treat and torture Palestinian prisoners. Prisoners are hooded, blindfolded and then hung by their wrists or forced to stand for long periods of time. Many are struck in the genitals or in other ways sexually abused or assaulted. Most are administered electric shock, while others are burned with cigarettes. Some prisoners are placed in specially constructed "cupboards," which are two feet square and five feet high with concrete spikes set in the floor. Subjecting a detainee to several daily routines of drying off with a space heater after a cold shower is common. The deprivation of sleep and prolonged beatings are universal in Israeli prisons and detention centers. It is estimated that between 70-80% of Palestinian prisoners suffer from some form of illness, either caused by or aggravated by their poor treatment while in prison.
Furthermore, an Amnesty International study in 1986 concluded that there is no country in the world in which the use of off icial and sustained torture is as well documented as it is in Israel.
Because of such investigations and the resulting international pressure, the Israeli govemment was forced to conduct its own investigation of alleged torture and inhumane treatment of Palestinian political prisoners. The now famous Landau Report concluded in 1987 that the for nearly 20 years, the Shin Beth (equivalent to the FBI or the Secret Service) systematically tortured Palestinian detainees for the sole purpose of extracting a confession. It also concluded that in many cases the detainees offered false confessions just to stop the torture. The report substantiated long-held Palestinian claims of human rights abuses in Israeli prisons.
These reports give impetus to international human rights activists to continue pressuring Israel to halt such atrocities. Pressure must also be placed on the U.S. govemment to stop aiding Israel until Israel cleans up its human rights record.
Steve Ghannam is a member of the Palestine Solidarity Committee in Ann Arbor.