[ 23/11/2010 - 10:30 AM ]
BETHLEHEM, (PIC)-- Financial Times newspaper said that claims of torture and abuse against Palestinian citizens by members of the Palestinian authority's security forces in the West Bank increased exponentially in recent times.
Its reporter Tobias Buck quoted the wife of a farmer and political analyst called Bader Abu Ayyash, 42, as saying that her husband was arrested by the PA preventive security in Bethlehem last September on allegation of his links with Hamas.
“He looked very different,” said Ms Abu Ayyash, a mother of four. “He could hardly walk. He had difficulty breathing and was very thin. When he shook my hand, I noticed that he had no strength at all.”
She has no doubt her husband was tortured. “I started screaming at the officer: ‘What are you doing to him?”’ Her pleas fell on deaf ears. After a few cursory exchanges, her husband was led back to his cell, according to the British newspaper.
"According to former inmates and activists familiar with Palestinian prisons, Ms Abu Ayyash has every reason to be worried. They say prisoners affiliated with the Islamist Hamas movement, which runs the Gaza Strip, are beaten regularly and deprived of medicine and basic comforts such as blankets and mattresses," the newspaper said.
It stated that "there is evidence that a significant number of detainees are tortured during interrogation. The most common form of abuse is known as Shabeh, in which detainees are handcuffed and bound in stress positions for long periods."
"Claims of torture and abuse by members of the Palestinian security forces are not new. There has, however, been a sharp rise in reported cases, leading Human Rights Watch to remark last month that 'reports of torture by Palestinian security forces keep rolling in.' The New York-based organization also bemoaned the 'rampant impunity' of officers allegedly involved in the abuses," it added.
Many analysts and observers fear that life in the west Bank is taking on an increasingly authoritarian hue. “I feel real concern that we are reaching the level of a police state,” Sha'wan Jabarin, the director of Al-Haq human rights group, said.
The newspaper also conveyed some Western diplomats' fears that the severe violations taking place in the West Bank will lead to a violent popular reaction that could undermine the authority of de facto president Abbas.
In a separate incident, the Islamic Jihad Movement said that the PA security militias in the West Bank summoned on Monday 40 of its members in Jenin city for interrogation.
It stated that they were summoned because they received a prisoner released from Israeli jails.
For his part, senior Hamas official Ra'fat Nasif said in a letter leaked from his cell that the violations which Fatah faction and its authority are committing in the West Bank reflect their intention to eradicate Hamas and not to end the inter-Palestinian division.
Nasif added that the kidnapping of a noted religious figure like Tamam Abu Assaud and the sons of a number of Hamas leaders and lawmakers as well as the violent raids on their homes in the West Bank confirm further that Fatah mortgaged itself to the Israeli occupation and became enslaved by the Zio-American dictates.
[ 23/11/2010 - 05:05 PM ]
RAMALLAH, (PIC)-- Families of Palestinian prisoners in West Bank jails said they are mulling over filing a lawsuit with international tribunals against a number of European countries for supporting the police regime of de facto president Mahmoud Abbas and his security forces that arrest and torture their sons.
In a press release, the families added that the brutality of the torture inflicted on their sons by PA interrogators and the resultant injuries and disabilities that happened to them are all because of the financial support given by known European countries to the authority of Abbas.
They stated that the cases of torture crimes cannot be revoked by prescription and they have the right to prosecute in international courts everyone or any country involved directly or indirectly in torturing their sons.
In a separate incident, Hamas lawmakers in the West Bank held the authority of Abbas fully responsible for the life of female detainee Tamam Abu Assaud, a noted religious figure, after her health deteriorated as a result of the bad situation she has been living in since her detention.
The lawmakers affirmed in a statement that they received information form her family that Abu Assaud was transferred from her cell to hospital in a very critical health condition and she is still under custody and prevented from visits.
They stressed that the detention of women is a reprehensible policy and a violation of all moral values and norms, denouncing at the same time the silence of human rights organizations on such crimes.
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