Human Rights Developments


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2002-08-16T15:24:00Z
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HEINZREPORT 2002

ISRAEL – PALESTINE

 

HEINZ – ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY: HUMAN RIGHT WATCH

 

Human Rights Developments

 

              Within
three weeks, more than 120 Palestinians were killed and over 4,800 injured in
clashes with Israeli security forces

              that
began on September 29. Most of the deaths were the result of excessive, and
often indiscriminate, use of lethal force

              by
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers, police, and border police against unarmed
civilian demonstrators, including

             
children. The casualties were disproportionately on the Palestinian
side, but two Israeli soldiers were beaten to death by

              a
Palestinian mob. The large number of deaths and injuries in the clashes and the
resulting deteriorating relationship

              between
Israel and the Palestinian Authority and neighboring states greatly
overshadowed and put into question certain

              human
rights improvements, notably, an apparent decrease in the use of torture by
Israeli interrogators, a reduction in the

             
hostages and administrative detainees Israel held, and fewer revocations
of Jerusalem residency permits. In several cases

              the
Israeli government also actively sought to thwart court rulings supporting
human rights by supporting initiatives to

             
legalize torture and hostage-taking, and by delaying the enforcement of
court rulings against discrimination. On July 24,

              the
Knesset voted to extend the fifty-two-year-old state of emergency until January
26, 2001, to allow the government

              time to
enact similar powers into statute law.

 

             
Discrimination in law and practice against ethnic and religious
minorities and other societal groups, especially on issues of

              employment,
social benefits, and personal status, remained a major problem. While court
challenges to discrimination

              were
sometimes successful, the process often took years, and court rulings
frequently were not applicable to other cases

              or were not fully implemented by the
government. For example, on March 8 the High Court of Justice ruled on an

              October
1995 petition brought by a Palestinian couple who, though Israeli citizens,
were barred from purchasing a home

              in a Jewish neighborhood built on
state-owned lands. More than 90 percent of land in Israel is state land, much
of it

             
expropriated from Palestinians. The court ruled that the authorities
could not allocate land to citizens solely on the basis

              of
their religion, though it noted that discrimination between Jews and non-Jews
might be acceptable under unspecified

             
"special circumstances." The ruling ordered the government to
take such "special circumstances" into consideration when

             
determining "with deliberate speed" whether it would allow the
couple to settle in the neighborhood, and stated that its

              ruling
in this case would not affect previous discriminatory land allocations.

 

              Women faced discrimination in
employment, access to education and health care, and personal status, including

             
marriage, divorce, inheritance, and child custody. (See Women's Human
Rights.) Palestinian women and foreign women

              workers faced additional
discrimination that made them especially vulnerable to abuses. A number of
well-publicized

              cases
of trafficking in women for prostitution, domestic violence, and sexual
harassment and assault helped increase

              public
awareness, but women suffering from such violations still had little recourse.
As of this writing, the Defense

             
Ministry had taken few steps to address an enduring pattern of sexual
harassment of women in the military, despite a

              number
of high-profile cases involving ministry officials. The Knesset voted on July 5
to lift the immunity of

             
Transportation Minister Yitzhak Mordechai, a former defense minister who
had served in the IDF for thirty-three years,

              after
he was accused in March of sexually assaulting three women under his
supervision beginning in 1992. By the end of

              July
the Civil Service Commission had received fifty-five complaints of sexual
harassment in the Defense Ministry, five

              more
than in all of 1999.

 

              On May
22, the High Court of Justice set a six month deadline for the government to
establish procedures for women to

              pray
"according to their custom" at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. The
case was brought in 1989 after conservative

              Jews
violently attacked Jewish women who were attempting to pray alongside men
according to the customs of Reform

             
Judaism. Despite a 1994 High Court of Justice ruling upholding the
women's right to worship at the Western Wall, they

              were
not permitted to do so. On March 31, a draft law punishing such prayer with up
to seven years of imprisonment

              passed its
preliminary Knesset reading, and in early June the government asked to have the
May 22 court judgement

             
reviewed by an expanded panel of judges, on the grounds that it failed
to adequately address "the affront to the feelings

              of those who pray at the wall" that
would ensue if women were allowed to pray with men.

 

              The
rate of revocation of permanent residency permits of Palestinian residents of
East Jerusalem declined following

             
Minister of Interior Natan Sharansky's October 17, 1999, announcement
that he had ended the so-called "center of life"

              policy.
(See Human Rights Watch World Report 2000). After repeated legal challenges led
by the Jerusalem-based

              Center
for Defense of the Individual (Hamoked), the High Court of Justice ordered
Sharansky to clarify the terms of the

              new
policy, and on March 15 he stated in an affidavit before the High Court of
Justice that Palestinian Jerusalemites living

              abroad
would not lose their permanent residency if they visited Jerusalem and
maintained valid Israeli-issued travel

             
documents. Those who acquired foreign nationality or permanent resident
status elsewhere continued to lose residency

              rights in Jerusalem, and Minister
Sharansky did not clarify the status of Palestinian Jerusalemites living in the
West Bank.

             
According to Hamoked, persons who sought to reinstate their residency
status under the new policy frequently faced

              serious
administrative obstacles. Some 11,000 Palestinians were estimated to have lost
their residency rights between

              1996
and 1999.

 

              Labor
conditions for foreign and Palestinian workers remained poor. Palestinians
faced widespread discrimination in

             
employment, while foreign workers were especially vulnerable to
exploitation by employers and labor contractors. On

              August
22, Ha'aretz reported that Prime Minister Ehud Barak had ordered an increase in
deportations of undocumented

              foreign
workers and set a quota of 50,000 work permits per year. The move was opposed
by workers' groups and even

              the
Public Security Ministry, which preferred a policy of targeting labor
importers. The government had temporarily

              halted
deportations in December 1999 following allegations of abuses of foreign
workers, including prolonged detention

              of
persons awaiting deportation; their detention together with criminal prisoners;
and the detention of victims of crimes

              while
awaiting to testify in criminal cases. In May, the Interior Ministry
acknowledged that it had prevented labor

             
organizations such as Kav La'oved from handing out pamphlets on labor
rights to workers arriving at Ben-Gurion airport.

 

              On
September 29, Israeli security forces used lethal force to disperse thousands
of Palestinians attending Friday prayers

              at
al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem after some of those present threw stones at
police and at Jewish worshipers at the

              Western
Wall. An unusually large number of Palestinians were present at the mosque to
protest a visit the previous day

              by Knesset
Member Ariel Sharon, interpreted by many as an assertion of Israeli sovereignty
over the area. Israeli forces

              killed
five Palestinians and wounded over 200. Violent clashes between Israeli
security forces and Palestinians then

              spread to other parts of the West Bank,
Gaza, and Israel. Within three weeks, more than 120 Palestinians were killed

              and
4,800 injured, many as result of excessive, often indiscriminate, use of lethal
force by Israeli security forces against

              unarmed
civilians. In a number of cases IDF soldiers appeared to target Palestinian
medics, at least one of whom was

              killed
and twenty-seven were injured by mid-October. At this writing, the IDF had
significantly expanded its use of tanks

              and
helicopter gunships armed with both missiles and medium-caliber machine guns in
Palestinian residential areas.

 

              Israel
retained extensive control over, and placed restrictions on, the freedom of
movement of all West Bank and Gaza

              Strip
Palestinians. These policies obstructed Palestinian economic activity and
access to health care, schools and

             
universities, places of worship, and family members in other parts of
the territories or in Israeli prisons. On October 25,

              1999,
Israel opened a "safe passage" allowing some increased movement
between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,

              but the
arbitrary nature of the criteria for issuing travel permits and their indiscriminate
imposition on an entire population

              assured
that the restrictions remained a form of collective punishment. Following
September 29 Israel increased

             
restrictions on movement into, out of, and within the West Bank and Gaza
Strip.

 

             
Palestinians passing through Israeli checkpoints were frequently
subjected to harassment, physical abuse, and even

              torture
by Israeli soldiers and police. For example, in a well-publicized incident on
September 6, three Palestinian

             
laborers required hospital treatment after being beaten by border police
at a checkpoint. During the attack the police

             
photographed themselves with their victims, and the unit commander later
told Ha'aretz, "What we did was not special.

             
Everybody does it." Other incidents resulted in deaths, as on July
9 when soldiers fired on a taxi carrying Atidal

             
Muammer, killing her and injuring her husband, two children, and other
passersby. Following an investigation, the IDF

              saidthe
killing was "a terrible mistake," and stated that its soldiers were
responding to shots from a different vehicle.

             
However, no such vehicle was recovered and no spent cartridges were
found at the scene of the shooting.

 

             
According to government figures, settlement construction in the
Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip increased by

              96
percent in the first half of 2000, with 860 of the 1,067 new starts in the
Jerusalem area. At the same time, demolitions

              of
Palestinian homes built without permits in the Israeli-occupied territories and
in Israel continued, as did forced

             
expulsions and expropriation of Palestinian land. In October and
November 1999, Israeli authorities expelled some

              seven
hundred Palestinian cave dwellers from the Mount Hebron area of the West Bank,
and destroyed or confiscated

              their homes
and their personal property, including livestock. The government alleged that
the area where the cave

             
dwellers had lived for decades was a "closed military zone."
An investigation by the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem,

              concluded, however, that the area had not
been used for military exercises, and the expulsion was more likely intended

              to
placate Jewish settlers whom the government had recently removed from a nearby
illegal settlement outpost. On

              March 29 the High Court of Justice
ruled that the cave dwellers could return to the area, pending a final
determination in

              the
case.

 

              Close
to one thousand Palestinian prisoners participated in a month-long hunger
strike in May, protesting arbitrary

             
treatment by prison officials, substandard prison conditions,
prohibitions on family visits, use of solitary confinement, poor

              medical
care, and Israel's refusal to release all the categories of prisoners specified
in its agreements with the Palestine

             
Liberation Organization (PLO). The strike was called off on May 31 after
prison authorities promised to review

             
complaints and ease some restrictions on visitors. According to
Ha'aretz, a government report issued in June on

             
conditions in Shatta prison described living conditions as
"particularly harsh" in the wing where Palestinian prisoners from

              the
Israeli-occupied territories were held, and concluded that the exposed tents
used to house prisoners and filthy

             
bathrooms at the prison were unfit for human use.

 

              Several
deaths in custody were reported. On August 11 Ramez Fayez Mohammed Rashid
Elrizi died in al-Nafha prison.

              His
father said that he had been in relatively good health during an August 9
visit. The family of Lafi al-Rajabi told the

             
nongovernmental Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights
and the Environment (LAW) that he had

             
contacted them on January 14, shortly before he died in an Israeli
detention center near Nablus, saying his life was in

              danger.
His body reportedly was returned to the family bearing cuts, bruises, and with
wire marks on the neck. A third

             
detainee, Sami As`ad, reportedly hanged himself in Kishon prison on June
19, seven weeks after being arrested.

             
According to Ha'aretz, a psychiatric evaluation had found him to have
personality disorders, and he had previously

             
attempted suicide. As of this writing, Human Rights Watch is not aware
of official findings regarding the causes of any of

              these
deaths being made public.

 

              On
April 12, the High Court of Justice ruled that Israel could not continue to
administratively detain Lebanese nationals

              solely
as "bargaining chips" for the return of its soldiers missing in
action. Five such hostages had been released in

              December
1999, and a sixth hostage, reported to be mentally ill, was released on April
5. Thirteen more hostages were

             
released on April 19, but Israel continued to hold Shaykh `Abd al-Karim
Obeid, kidnapped in July 1989, and Mustafa

              al-Dirani, kidnapped in May 1994, despite
repeated court challenges. Both men were held in solitary confinement at an

             
undisclosed location, and on March 13 a lawyer for al-Dirani filed a
civil case against the Israeli government seeking

             
NIS6,000,000 (U.S. $1,473,900) in compensation for torture, including
rape, that al-Dirani had allegedly suffered while

              in
Israeli custody. On June 11 the Israeli Cabinet approved draft legislation to
legalize hostage-taking which was

             
specifically intended to facilitate al-Dirani and Obeid's continued
detention, and the bill passed its first Knesset reading on

              June
21.

 

              Israel
also continued to detain Palestinians for long periods without charge or trial.
According to the IDF, as of

             
September 12 Israel held five Palestinians as administrative detainees,
including Khaled Hussein Jaradat, who had been

              held
continuously since August 21, 1997.

 

              Following
a September 6, 1999, High Court of Justice ruling that General Security Service
(GSS) officers were not

             
authorized to use "physical means"-torture-during
interrogations, reports of incidents of torture decreased significantly.

              However, according to the nongovernmental
Public Committee against Torture in Israel (PCATI), the GSS continued to

              employ
interrogation techniques including beatings, sleep deprivation, prolonged
periods handcuffed to chairs, placing

              detainees with
"collaborators" who beat, tortured, and threatened them to obtain
confessions; and long periods of

             
incommunicado detention. In February, the government made public the
summary of a 1995 state comptroller report

              showing that high-ranking GSS officers
had condoned "serious and systematic violations" by GSS interrogators
between

              1988
and 1992, and had lied to judges. No actions were taken, however, to prosecute
individuals who had been

              responsible for torture, and the Knesset
continued to consider draft legislation to legalize torture in cases where a
suspect

              was
believed to have information that could stop an imminent attack.

 

             
Palestinian Authority

 

              Palestinian security services
continued to operate with impunity, despite recurring cases of torture,
arbitrary arrests, and

             
prolonged detention without charge or trial. An overwhelmed judiciary
was further weakened by repeated executive

              branch
interference in its work. Critics of these and other Palestinian Authority
(P.A.) abuses were frequently subject to

             
harassment, arrest, and in some instances, violent attacks. Military and
state security courts issued death sentences after

              grossly
unfair trials, which were not subject to appeal.

 

              While
individuals alleged to have affiliations to political organizations critical of
P.A. policy were frequently targeted for

             
arbitrary arrest, there were also reports of mass arrests, as when some
thirty students were detained after a

             
demonstration at Birzeit University on February 26. In June, the
non-governmental Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring

              Group
(PHRMG) reported that despite seventy-three High Court of Justice orders to
release detainees that had been

              issued
since January 1997, only four had been implemented. For example, as of this
writing Wa`il`Ali Faraj, arrested on

              April
25, 1996, remained in detention despite a February 20, 1999, court order for
his release.

 

              The
security forces' impunity extended to torture and ill-treatment of both
political and criminal detainees. According to

              LAW,
when questioned on August 7 about specific cases of torture, Police Commander
Major Kamal al-Shaykh

             
asserted that "the thief who does not confess must be beaten as a
last resort to force him to confess." Such attitudes may

              have
contributed to the June 6 death in custody of thirty-five-year-old Khalid
Mohammed Yunis Bahar. According to the

             
Palestinian human rights group Law in the Service of Man (al-Haq), P.A.
police arrested Bahar on May 25, apparently

              without
a warrant, and his family was prevented from visiting him. Earlier, on December
6, 1999, Mahmud Mohammed

              Khalil
Hassan al-Bajjali, age thirty-three, died in Ramallah prison. Both men were
reported to have been in good health.

              As of
this writing the P.A. had not released autopsy reports in these and twenty-one
cases of deaths in custody that

             
occurred in previous years.

 

              During
clashes between Palestinians and the IDF that began on September 29 (see
above), Palestinian security forces

              failed
to act consistently and effectively to prevent armed civilians from opening
fire on IDF soldiers or positions from

              places
where civilians were present. This failure endangered the Palestinian civilian
population when the IDF responded,

              often
excessively and indiscriminately.

 

              The
judiciary suffered from a severe lack of resources and executive branch
interference, and trials fell far short of

             
international fair trial standards. P.A. President Yasser Arafat refused
to ratify the Judicial Authority Law, passed by

             
parliament on November 25, 1998, and instead issued ad hoc decrees,
including a June 1 decree creating a Supreme

             
Judicial Council with poorly defined powers, and a November 1, 1999
decree creating the post of "attorney general for

              state
security courts." The new post was filled by Khaled al-Qidra, the disgraced
former attorney general who had been

              removed
from his post in 1997 following complaints of corruption and protests by human
rights organizations.

 

              Fair
trial violations were particularly egregious in state security courts, which,
along with "regular" military courts, had the

              power
to try civilians and were responsible for the majority of death sentences
passed. Trials in these courts were not

              subject
to appeal, and sentences were sometimes issued only hours after arrest, as in
the case of Raji Saqir. A state

             
security court sentenced Saqir to death on July 3, having convened on
the night of July 2, the day after the crime was

             
committed. Security court jurisdiction was expanded in June to include
drug trafficking cases, including those punishable

              by
death.

 

              The
P.A. continued its efforts to control and restrict freedom of expression.
Broadcast media were frequently subject to

              closure, and journalists and commentators to
arrest, in retaliation for reporting criticism of P.A. policies. Five radio and

             
television stations were ordered suspended between May 5 and June 2, and
on June 2 Samir Qumsiah, chair of the

              Council of Private Radio and
Television Stations, was arrested after calling on stations to halt broadcasts
for half an hour

              to
protest the closures. Security forces also arrested eight prominent
personalities who signed a November 27, 1999,

             
petition criticizing P.A. "tyranny and corruption." Six were
released on JD50,000 (U.S. $70,000) bail on December 19,

              but
Ahmad Dudin and `Abd al-Sattar Qassem were held until January 6. Qassem was
rearrested on February 18 and

             
detained until July 28, despite a July 11 High Court of Justice order
for his release.

 

             
Academics risked punishment when their published views challenged social
conventions. On November 24, 1999 the

              Islamic
University in Gaza suspended Dr. Jawad al-Dalou and two students for publishing
a student newspaper article

              that
noted that many beggars came from the Nezla district in Gaza. A statement
issued by the university said the

              suspensions
were "in respect of the wishes of the dignified local personalities of the
district of Nezla in the Jabalia camp."

 

              On
February 29 Chief of Police Ghazi al-Jabali issued new regulations limiting
freedom of assembly, in contravention of

             
existing law. The regulations prohibited organizing processions,
demonstrations, or public meetings without prior

             
approval from the district police commander, on penalty of up to two
months of imprisonment or an up to JD50 (U.S.

              $70)
fine. The High Court of Justice suspended their implementation on April 29, but
as of September had not acted to

              revoke
these or other regulations limiting freedom of assembly issued by President
Arafat in his capacity as minister of

             
interior on April 30.