Mass arrests create new foes for Israel
Human rights groups condemn army as hundreds of
Palestinian men are detained and humiliated
Suzanne Goldenberg in Tulkaram, West Bank
Saturday March 16, 2002
The Guardian
Hundreds of Palestinian boys and men, rounded up at gunpoint
in Israel's sweep through the refugee camps of the West Bank,
were left hungry and unwashed and were taunted by their
captors during a confinement that lasted as long as six days,
the Guardian has learned.
The only apparent criteria for the mass arrests was that they
were Palestinian and male, aged between 15 and 45.
The round-up has been condemned by Israeli and international
organisations - including the United Nations - who say such
sweeping arrests are a gross violation of Israel's duties as an
occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza.
The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem said that the army had
"lost any moral compass", and the Public Committee against
Torture in Israel said the detainees had been subjected to
"degrading and humiliating treatment".
"This is very bad and brutal," said Hannah Friedman, director of
the Public Committee against Torture in Israel. "You are not
allowed to arrest people without real evidence. This goes against
all the conventions. They put numbers on arms, and closed their
eyes. This was only to humiliate all the men and the people in
the camps, and these mass arrests will make it more difficult to
make peace with this people later on. We are creating our own
enemies."
Amid the chaos of Israel's successive invasions of West Bank
refugee camps, it is uncertain how many boys and men were
taken from their homes. Israeli human rights groups have said
the number may be more than 2,000; Israel's army chief,
General Shaul Mofaz, said there were 1,500.
What is clear, however, is that by the army's own admission
virtually none was a wanted militant, and the detainees had no
access to lawyers or humanitarian organisations during their
detention.
In Tulkaram, the round-up came in two waves, after Israeli tanks
thundered into the refugee camp in the early hours of March 7.
"We were in the middle of the camp under the siege of Israelis.
It was terrifying - there were Apache helicopters over our heads
and many, many snipers. Anybody moving in the street was
shot," said Faisal Salamah, 36, the local director of refugee
affairs for the Palestinian Authority. "They called on all men from
the age of 12 and up to go to the school, or they would destroy
our homes. One of the men with me was 80 years old."
At the school - which is run by the UN - the men were
handcuffed and in many cases blindfolded and left to wait for
nearly 12 hours, until they were bussed to two holding pens at
Ofer, an Israeli army base, and Kedumim, an illegal Jewish
settlement.
Some of the men were held for as long as six days. At least 50
were unceremoniously dumped on a perilous stretch of road
outside Jerusalem at around midnight on Tuesday, forced to
pass Jewish settlements and Israeli army tanks to find their way
to their homes, many miles away.
During the first stage of detention at the UN school, the men
were allowed no phone calls, given no food or water and
forbidden from using the toilet. "If anybody fell asleep, they
would kick him to wake him up," said Mahmoud Abu Taha, 42, a
father of six.
Before the Palestinian uprising, Mr Abu Taha had a job delivering
cooking gas canisters inside Israel. He says he reported to the
school at about 1.30pm on the afternoon of Friday, March 8. He
returned home at lunchtime on Thursday. "The Israelis never
asked me even one question," he said. From the schoolyard in
Tulkaram, he and other detainees were taken by bus to
Kedumim. They were put in small rooms - five men to a cell -
and finally allowed to remove their blindfolds.
He was given his first meal at 6pm the following day. The food,
to be shared among the five men in his cell, consisted of one
loaf of sliced bread, three cucumbers, three tomatoes, yoghurt
and water. For the next three days, they subsisted on
cucumbers, tomatoes and yoghurt alone, and then, on
Wednesday, the five men in Mr Abu Taha's cell block were given
four pieces of chicken.
Mr Salamah's experiences were even more bizarre. His group
was bundled into 13 buses and driven, in blindfolds and
handcuffs, to the Israeli army base at Ofer. They arrived in the
middle of the night to face massed ranks of soldiers armed with
clubs. "We were really panicked and scared," he said. "We
thought they were going to beat the crap out of us."
Most of the men were freed the next evening, but Mr Salamah
and 55 others were taken off their bus as the convoy left. They
spent three more nights at the camp, assembling for roll call
each morning under stringent conditions. "If you stood up you
would be shot, if you turned your head to the left or right you
would be shot, if you looked at the soldiers, you would be shot,"
he said. Mr Salamah was only asked his name. The men were
finally released last Tuesday night - but miles away from
Tulkaram. It was nearly midnight.
"We were astonished to find ourselves at an army checkpoint,"
said Nisar Naif, a government clerk. "They had to pull us by our
collars to get us off the bus, we were so scared. Then they
pointed their guns and told us to run towards the nearest
Palestinian village. There is really only one explanation for
putting us so close to a settlement: they wanted us to be
killed."
The men eventually made their way to the Palestinian village of
Hizme, where they were confronted by screaming women and
hostile men who thought their village was under attack from
Jewish settlers or the Israeli army.
The round-ups in Tulkaram set the stage for mass arrests in
other refugee camps as the Israeli army stepped up its offensive
in the West Bank. Hundreds of men were held at a quarry in
Deheishe, south of Bethlehem, and the army tried to conduct
round-ups in the Amari refugee camp in Ramallah and in the city
of Qalqiliya.
Almost all of the detainees have now been freed. However, the
arrests have left a deep residue of hatred. "When you take
hundreds of men and boys and say they are terrorist, they are
fighters, and then release them, you have to ask: 'what for, what
for?'" said Mohammed Heikal, an official from the UN Relief and
Works Agency in Tulkaram. "Just to get photos with them and
say they have surrendered to boost Israeli morale? Sharon
wanted to put this on television to say: 'Look, Israel came into
the Palestinian camps'."
The Israeli army says that, technically, it never arrested the
men, and that it was lawful to hold the men for up to 96 hours
without access to a lawyer. It also says it had doctors on hand.
"We did not want to engage in combat with the people in the
camps who were not terrorist activists, and so we asked people
to surrender," Lieutenant-Colonel Olivier Rafowicsz said. "We
did not arrest them in the camp, they came to us. They
surrendered." However, he admitted that none of the men in
Tulkaram was a wanted militant.
"It is questionable whether military force in that kind of mass
arrest is in conformity with the obligation of an occupying power
to respect and treat humanely the occupied population and
protect it against violence," said Catherine Deman, of the
International Committee for the Red Cross.
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