Rights Group Says Palestinians Practice Torture

JERUSALEM — A respected Palestinian human rights monitor charged Monday that the Palestinian Authority routinely engages in “illegal behavior and torture on a large scale” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The self-rule government headed by Yasser Arafat makes arbitrary arrests of its political opposition and silences press criticism through intimidation and direct intervention, the independent Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group asserted.

The charges, laid out in a 27-page report called “The State of Human Rights in Palestine,” come on the heels of allegations of widespread corruption in Palestinian ministries and government institutions.

The human rights report was compiled by Bassam Eid, an activist who made his reputation monitoring Israeli abuses of Palestinians under the military occupation.

Eid was detained by Arafat’s presidential guard for 25 hours in January 1996, after accusing Arafat of using official television to campaign in Palestinian national elections and blocking coverage of opposition candidates.

The report, released Monday, focused on torture, illegal arrests, poor prison conditions and restrictions on freedom of the press. It recounts the deaths of two prisoners in Palestinian police custody and records 42 other cases of torture.

Torture--primarily beatings and tying up prisoners in painful positions--is committed by nearly all of Arafat’s security forces, in some cases in the presence of senior officers, the report says.

It notes that political or security prisoners are not singled out for torture and that if they are harmed it is “in more or less the same ways as purely criminal suspects.”