Palestinians subjected to new Israeli technique called ‘the lottery’
By John Ward Anderson
HEBRON, West Bank, 2 January 2003 — A Palestinian high school student, 18, who’d just finished prayers at a Hebron mosque was detained Monday night by Israeli Border Police in this bitterly divided West Bank town. Family and neighbors said Tuesday that his badly beaten body was found by friends 20 minutes later in the middle of a road half a mile away.
The killing of the youth, Amran Abu Hamediye, who Palestinian witnesses said was beaten severely around his head, was part of what Hebron residents contend is a dramatic rise in assaults on Palestinians by Israeli Border Police since Nov. 15, when Palestinian gunmen killed 12 Israeli border policemen, soldiers and settlement security guards an ambush near the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a religious shrine here that’s uneasily shared by Jews and Muslims.
"Beatings by the Border Police are not new," said Abdel Salam Abu Khalaf, a spokesman at Al-Ahli Hospital in Hebron. "All the time since my childhood we looked at them as if they enjoyed beating us. But it’s been going on all the time in the last 1 1/2 months."
"We make complaints — we lie to ourselves and do it for the record — because the truth is there’s absolutely no punishment for the soldiers," said Rashed Rajabi, 30, a construction worker who was with Abu Hamediye when he was detained and who found his body a short time later.
Rajabi said he filed a complaint with Israeli authorities about his friend’s death but expects no results because "the judge and the defendant are the same."
A spokeswoman for the Israeli Border Police said Abu Hamediye’s killing is under investigation.
Several Hebron residents said that, although it’s unclear how Abu Hamediye was killed, they and other Palestinians here recently have been subjected to a technique called "the lottery."
In the lottery, they said, border policemen order apprehended Palestinians to pick from folded pieces of paper that have different punishments written on them — such as "broken leg," "smashed hand" or "smashed head" — and then administer the chosen punishment.
An Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, described the lottery technique in a story published Dec. 22.
A Hebron taxi driver, 43, who declined to be identified, said 10 days ago he and his family were stopped in their private car and given a choice of being beaten or having their car smashed. When they chose the latter, he said, border police troops pulled a piece of paper from their pocket and announced that that was what was written on the paper, then proceeded to smash the windows, windshield and lights. Yael Stein, an attorney from the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, charged that border police and army attacks on Palestinians may be on the rise because the incidents aren’t adequately investigated by Israeli authorities, and officers and soldiers involved are rarely punished.
"The army does not come out with a clear message that says, ‘You are not allowed to assault a civilian Palestinian.’ The message is vague and ambiguous," she said. "There is a general atmosphere that enables these things to happen and the soldiers are checking the limits all the time."
B’tselem released a report Monday describing an incident in Hebron on Dec. 3 in which the organization said four soldiers detained five Palestinian men at a barber shop and forcibly shaved the heads of two of them.
The soldiers also used three of the men as human shields, standing behind them and firing over their shoulders at Palestinian stone-throwers, according to the report. Also Monday, Israeli soldiers took over two medical clinics in the West Bank City of Nablus, 30 miles north of Jerusalem, and used the building as a firing position while holding patients inside, according to the organization Physicians for Human Rights.
"It’s clear to us that entering a building in which there was a medical facility and shooting from the place jeopardizes the building and makes it a target for fire, and it’s against the Geneva Convention, which protects the neutrality of medical facilities and patients," said a spokesman for the group, Miri Weingarten. She said the incident was part of "an erosion, a general disregard of medical neutrality that has increased over the last two years and which has become progressively worse."
A senior Israeli official, who asked not to be quoted by name, disputed the assertion that Israeli police and soldiers in the Gaza Strip and West Bank act with impunity, saying 32 soldiers have been indicted in cases involving alleged theft of Palestinian property, excessive violence and unwarranted shootings.
"It is of great concern to us, and we hope that most of these cases turn out to be much ado about nothing," he said. "If there is a body or an injured person, we can’t dispute that. But if there are police and soldiers involved in these incidents, we can try to exonerate them, and if they are guilty, they will be dealt with severely."
The army, in a written response to B’tselem on Dec. 29, said it was "unable to locate the case" involving the Hebron barber shop. "The case is unknown," a military spokesman said Tuesday. Israeli radio said, Tuesday night the matter is under internal investigation by military police.
A military source said the takeover of medical clinics in Nablus on Monday was necessary because Israeli soldiers were under attack by Palestinians.
"There was fighting in the area that included throwing Molotov cocktails and opening fire toward our forces, and therefore the position was taken," the source said.
He added that the building was principally an office building and was not taken and occupied by soldiers because of the clinics.
Jonathan Pelled, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said border police and army officials take Abu Hamediye’s death and allegations about the lottery "very, very seriously." But, he said, "there are several question marks surrounding the whole issue," including the number on the police vehicle, which cannot be traced to any jeep that was on patrol in the area Monday night, he said.
"I hope and pray it has nothing to do with the Border Police and is some kind of internal Palestinian business in which people are trying to blame someone else," he said.
The spokeswoman for the Israeli Border Police said Abu Hamediye’s killing is being investigated by the Justice Ministry’s Department of Interrogation of Policemen. "It has to be said that there is no proof that this is Israeli Border Police," said the spokeswoman, Liat Perl.
She said the same unit is investigating other allegations of brutality by the Border Police, a military corps that often seconds the army in controlling the Palestinian population in occupied areas.
"In the last three months, not even one interrogation indicated that these allegations are true," Perl said. But, she added, "if anyone violated human rights or goes against the regulations, he will be disciplined." Rajabi, the man who found Abu Hamediye’s body in Hebron, said he, Abu Hamediye and two other men had just left the mosque about 7:45 p.m. when a jeep with four border policemen pulled to a stop nearby and called for them to approach. For some reason — perhaps because he was the youngest, Rajabi said — the Israeli troops focused on Abu Hamediye, who was bundled into the back of the jeep and driven away.
Because other Palestinians have been detained by Israeli Border Police, Rajabi said, he and the others knew generally where their friend was probably going to be taken, so they followed on foot to help him.
About 20 minutes later, Rajabi said, they discovered the body lying in the street, bleeding from several gashes to his head.
Bajes Abu Hamediye, Amran’s uncle, said he was watching from his second-floor balcony nearby and saw a number written on top of the jeep: 113. (LAT-WP) |
