Rights Group Claims Israel Tortures Palestinian Prisoners

A leading American human rights organization on Tuesday accused the Israeli army and secret police of systematically torturing Palestinian prisoners, even after the agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization on self-government.

Describing Israeli interrogation of Palestinian prisoners as based on routine, officially tolerated--and even sanctioned--physical and psychological abuse, Human Rights Watch called on the Clinton Administration to tie the $3 billion Israel receives annually in U.S. aid to ending torture.

Human Rights Watch, noting that U.S. law prohibits assistance to countries where the government “engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights,” said Washington cannot continue to ignore the widely documented torture of Palestinian prisoners and instead should see it as a threat to peace in the Middle East.

Eric Goldstein, research director for the Mideast section of Human Rights Watch, said in an interview that Palestinian self-government in the Gaza Strip and the Jericho district in the West Bank had reduced the number of Palestinians interrogated by Israeli security forces but changed nothing else.

“Torture is still an issue,” he said. “Two weeks after their withdrawal from Gaza, Israelis still had about 200 Palestinians in interrogation centers on the West Bank and in Israel; moreover, they will want the Palestinian Authority to turn over certain suspects to them for questioning.”

Maj. Gen. Ilan Biran, commander of Israeli forces in the West Bank and in central Israel, dismissed the allegations of systematic torture and said isolated instances, when discovered and proven, were punished.

“Forget it--it’s not true,” Biran said. “We are doing our best to prevent (torture) and behave like human beings. Unfortunately, there are a few occasions when soldiers and policemen go wrong, very wrong, in their behavior. . . . But don’t try (to make) a mistake of one (interrogator) into routine brutality.”

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces rejected “unequivocally” the Human Rights Watch allegations. “Any means of torture or violence against detainees is forbidden by Israeli law and any confession extracted against the free will of the detainee is inadmissible as evidence,” the army spokesman said, declaring that military interrogators “strictly abide” by these rules.

But state-run Israeli television, in cooperation with Human Rights Watch, broadcast an hourlong special Tuesday on the interrogations that appeared likely to call such assertions into question.

Israeli liberals have tried but failed before to launch a national debate on one of the most controversial aspects of Israel’s 27-year occupation of the Palestinian territories. But it will be hard to ignore troubling accounts by Israeli soldiers of what they did and what they saw while serving at interrogation centers.

Drawing on detailed interviews with 36 Palestinians held over the past two years, on interviews with four Israeli soldiers who served at interrogation centers and on court testimony by agents of the General Security Service, the secret police agency known as Shin Bet, Human Rights Watch concluded that torture is a regular, deliberate practice.

“The overriding strategy of Israel’s interrogation agencies in getting uncooperative detainees to talk is to subject them to a coordinated, rigid and increasingly painful regime of physical constraints and psychological pressures over days and very often for three or four weeks,” the study said.

Two-thirds of the former detainees Human Rights Watch interviewed said they had been beaten--punched, kicked, thrown against walls or had their testicles crushed by an interrogator’s boot. Nearly all reported they were deprived of sleep for days or that they were forced to stand in small closets, were confined to tiny chairs, had been shackled and stretched out or bent over. And most said they were kept blindfolded or hooded with canvas sacks.

“The intensive, sustained and combined use of these methods inflicts the severe mental or physical suffering that is central to internationally accepted definitions of torture,” Human Rights Watch said, disputing Israeli assertions that the techniques, though harsh, fall far short of torture.

“Israel’s political leadership cannot claim ignorance that ill treatment is the norm in interrogation centers,” the group continued. “The number of victims is too large, and the abuses are too systematic. Official acquiescence is indicated also by the extreme infrequency with which abuses are punished and the fact that the classified (secret) guidelines for (Shin Bet) interrogators actually permit, under certain circumstances, the use of ‘moderate’ physical pressure to obtain information.”

This report bolsters earlier studies conducted by Israeli, Palestinian and international groups, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International and B’Tselem, an Israeli organization that monitors human rights abuses in the occupied territories.