Israeli Court Chastises Army Over Prisoners

They shiver in tents in frigid nighttime desert air. Dozens of prisoners share a single squalid pit toilet. Family visits are almost unknown.

Conditions like these prompted Israel’s Supreme Court on Wednesday to issue a rare rebuke to the army, calling for improvements for hundreds of Palestinian “administrative detainees” held inside Israel without trial or criminal charge.

At the same time, however, the high court rejected human rights groups’ petitions for a more sweeping denunciation of the treatment of the detainees, most of whom were arrested eight months ago during Israel’s largest military offensive in a generation in the West Bank.

Over a period of weeks in April and May, Israeli troops took over most of the West Bank’s major population centers, rounding up hundreds of Palestinians after a wave of suicide bombings by militants. The army says about 1,060 Palestinians are prisoners at a remote camp in the southern Negev desert called Keziot; 720 more are imprisoned at Ofra, a military base near the Jewish settlement of the same name, outside the West Bank city of Ramallah.

There has been little public debate about the detainees in Israel, which is preoccupied with a constant and continuing security threat and by a national political contest tainted by allegations of corruption and vote-buying within Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Likud Party.

Rights group say the conditions at both of the main facilities for holding administrative detainees -- but particularly at Keziot -- fall far short of international norms governing the treatment of prisoners.

“It’s so filthy, so degrading, really beyond belief,” said Murad Sana of the rights group Adalah -- Arabic for “justice” -- which brought the court action on behalf of prisoners at the desert camp.

In its filing, the group told of prisoners’ being held for months in tents in an area where temperatures soar in the summer and plunge in the winter; of meals eaten either while crouching on the ground or sitting on cots because there are no tables; of 66 men sharing a single pit toilet in the open, with no enclosure for privacy.

No family visits were permitted until the last month, Sana said, and even once the ban was lifted, there was no provision for travel permits for families of prisoners who are from West Bank cities now under military curfew.

The army argued -- and the justices accepted -- that conditions, while primitive, had improved. The military said soldiers in the field suffered similar privations.

Israel’s deep ambivalence over how to treat Palestinians who it believes may have plotted deadly attacks against Israelis -- but who have not yet had any opportunity to defend themselves against such accusations -- came through clearly in the court ruling.

“We would not be human ourselves if we did not guarantee a standard of humanity to those detained within our custody,” the justices wrote. “Such is the duty of the Israeli government in accordance with its essential character -- Jewish, democratic and fundamentally humane.”

The court took note of the circumstances that led to the army offensive, calling it the result of “severe terrorist activity” against which the country had no choice but to defend itself.

Israeli authorities, it said, were overwhelmed by the sheer number of detainees rounded up over a short period. At the height of the offensive, about 6,000 Palestinians were in custody.

Even so, the justices said, the army should have anticipated large numbers of arrests and prepared better facilities for holding the prisoners.

“There was the opportunity to prepare in advance an area with suitable detention conditions,” the ruling said.

The justices urged the army to make immediate changes, including housing the men in barracks instead of tents and setting up tables for meals. “Detainees are not animals, and they should not be forced to eat on the ground,” they wrote.

The court also recommended that the army consider transferring the detainees to the state prison authority, where they would be held in conditions similar to jailed Israelis.

The larger question of administrative detention and its legality, however, was not addressed.

Despite international criticism, Israel has consistently defended its right to hold prisoners for long periods without trial or charges. However, it had quietly moved away from the practice in the years preceding the current violence, which erupted nearly 27 months ago.

Rights groups say that just before the start of the intifada, the number of administrative detainees had dwindled to fewer than 20.