There’s a rule of thumb for journalists reporting on the Palestinians: if it can’t be blamed on Israel, it isn’t news. But some rules demand to be broken.
After a two-year investigation and nearly 100 interviews with detainees, Human Rights Watch released a report last week documenting the Palestinian leadership’s gross violation of its people’s human rights. Both Hamas, which rules Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority, which governs in the West Bank, are implicated. The two groups conduct arbitrary arrests for offences as ludicrous as critical Facebook posts, and regularly torture detainees.
The report — Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent — details cases of horrific violence and repression. Hamas kept Fouad Jarada, a journalist accused of “harming revolutionary unity”, in a notorious room called “the bus” for a month, forcing him to stand blindfolded on a small child’s chair for days at a time and whipping him with a cable. In the West Bank, detainees tell of being punched, kicked, beaten with batons, slammed against walls, and electrically shocked until they confess.
Both Palestinian organisations said they reject torture and consider the incidents HRW compiled to be “isolated cases that are investigated when brought to the attention of authorities, who hold perpetrators to account”. But Human Rights Watch couldn’t find a single official in either jurisdiction convicted of mistreating detainees or making arbitrary arrests.
“The habitual, deliberate, widely known use of torture, using similar tactics over years with no action taken by senior officials in either authority to stop these abuses, make these practices systematic,” the report concludes. “They also indicate that torture is governmental policy for both the PA and Hamas.” Since this likely constitutes a crime against humanity, HRW recommends that the International Criminal Court open an investigation.
Fatah, the party that controls the Palestinian Authority, may be more “moderate” than Hamas in its approach to Israel, but it is brutal to Palestinians in the West Bank. The report explains that even when the authority releases detainees, it often refuses to drop charges, leaving behind a pretext for repeated punitive arrests to harass critics into silence. Vaguely worded laws also empower officials to detain Palestinians for calling for free expression on Facebook, or reporting on unemployment. The offenders are then held in custody for weeks for provoking “sectarian strife” and insulting “higher authorities”. Similarly, in Gaza, the wrong post on social media can result in persecution for “misuse of technology”.
Read the article by Elliot Kaufmann in The Australian (from The Wall Street Journal).