If there is any topic that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are known to be concerned with, it is torture (or alleged torture.) The two groups will interview former prisoners and detainees and, often without any corroboration of the stories, publish the most lurid details of the types of tortures endured (or allegedly endured) by the victims.
It is difficult to think of something that human rights groups are better equipped to do than to publicize cases of torture.
There is one group of people that HRW and Amnesty have completely ignored, however.
Last July, the Jerusalem District Court ruled in an 1,800 page decision that some 52 Arabs who were accused of “collaboration” with Israel were entitled to damages for being tortured, often horrifically, by the Palestinian Authority.
The proceedings lasted 14 years. The verdict was announced two months ago. The stories are horrific:
The 1,800-page court decision written by Justice Moshe Drori elaborates on the details of the torture. The gruesome stories, it found, were confirmed by eyewitnesses, the scars on their bodies, and testimony from psychologists.
The victims are being represented by the law office of Barak Kedem, Aryeh Arbus, Netanel Rom and David Zur. Kedem, in an interview with The Times of Israel, described some of the worst cases of torture he can remember from the trial.
For days on end, prisoners were hung upside down. After they lost consciousness, they would be put right side up until they regained consciousness. Then the process would be repeated, he said.
Another method of torture was transferring prisoners back and forth between hot and cold baths. Many had their teeth pulled out with pliers, while some had fingernails extracted. Many spent weeks at a time in a tiny metal closet in which they couldn’t move their bodies.
One man was placed inside a metal barrel and left for five hours in the hot August sun. When they took him out, his interrogators placed salt all over his blistering skin.
Walid himself said that the worst torture method was forcing prisoners to sit on the head of a broken bottle of glass, which tore up their insides.
Though the prisoners were placed in different jails throughout the West Bank, many described the same methods of torture.
Kedem said this showed that these methods “were ordered from up top and not at the discretion of individual interrogators.” In his decision, Justice Drori agreed with this assessment.
At no point while in PA custody were the prisoners brought before a judge.
A few alleged ex-Shin Bet agent prisoners were killed while in jail. (They were represented in the lawsuit by their parents.)
Walid said he witnessed more than one of the executions.
I could not find a single story about torture in Palestinian Authority prisons for any reason on the Amnesty website although there are several that allege Israel tortures Palestinian prisoners.
HRW has a couple of articles about Palestinian rights abuses that mention torture of detainees, but not a word about the “collaborators” with Israel who suffered – provably – the worst kinds of torture, abuse and death.
I mentioned recently that the only people in the world without human rights protection from NGOs are the Jews of Judea and Samaria, whom these groups are urging to be subject to mass population transfer, an explicit war crime.
This group of “collaborators” with Israel are an even worse example of people whom the NGOs willfully ignore or want to see tortured and dead.
Because they were trying to stop Palestinians from killing Jews.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Leave a Reply