When former Guantanamo detainee Asadullah Haroon appears at footage of Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons, the recollections of his personal abuse and torture in United States detention centres come flooding again.
“That is the worst type of oppression,” he says. “If you find yourself labelled as a terrorist you can not defend your self in any means. Surely it’s the identical course of; they’re torturing the folks in the identical means. I believe the Individuals have made this and the Israelis are implementing it.”
Haroon, who received his case in opposition to the US authorities for unlawful imprisonment in 2021, was held with out cost within the infamous Guantanamo Bay jail in Cuba for 16 years following his arrest in 2007. Surely, he says, Palestinians held in Israeli prisons now are enduring related therapy to that he skilled.
“It’s like within the first days once I was arrested, I used to be crushed to an extent that I used to be standing; I couldn’t sit down or if I used to be sitting down and crushed up, I couldn’t stand up. Identical with insomnia and I used to be assaulted for a number of days. Plenty of the prisoners have been bitten by canine. We have been offered little or no medical care.
“Bodily torture was actually unhealthy however the worst was psychological torture in several varieties. I imagine there isn’t a lot of a distinction within the torture of prisoners of Palestine, Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib.”
Attacked by canine and disadvantaged of water
Some 54 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli jails since Israel launched its lethal warfare on Gaza in October final 12 months, based on the Fee of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs in Gaza. The United Nations Human Rights Workplace in Palestine says it has been receiving a number of studies of mass detentions, abuse of prisoners and compelled disappearances of Palestinians for months, whereas harrowing testimonies have been offered to assist businesses or posted to social media by Palestinians who’ve been launched from detention.
In late April, the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, revealed particulars of the abuse of Palestinian prisoners who had been jailed with out trial.
Its report included descriptions of normal beatings, prisoners being attacked by canine, being pressured to kiss the Israeli flag, being pressured to curse the Prophet Muhammad, being disadvantaged of water (together with for a bathroom in a cell shared by 10 inmates), the electrical energy being lower, inadequate meals and being stripped bare.
One prisoner’s account reads: “A guard then began to stuff carrots into the anus of AH and different prisoners.”
A lot of the abuse carried out in Israeli prisons has been filmed by the troopers carrying it out. It has sturdy echoes of the therapy of Iraqi and Afghan prisoners in US detention centres such because the infamous Abu Ghraib jail – the place US troopers photographed themselves alongside prisoners in humiliating positions in 2003.
The Public Committee Towards Torture in Israel (PCATI) and different human rights organisations have referred to as on the United Nations particular rapporteur on torture for pressing motion to finish “the systematic abuse, torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli prisons and detention services”.
That submission by Adalah, HaMoked, Physicians for Human Rights Israel and PCATI describes a “brutal escalation”, characterised by what seems to be systemic violence, torture and ill-treatment in opposition to Palestinians in Israeli custody in seven totally different prisons and detention services for the reason that begin of the warfare in October.
Attorneys and activists say the Israeli therapy of Palestinian prisoners bears all of the hallmarks of “US-style” abuse and torture.
“Sadly over the previous 20 years the US has given the world a really unhealthy instance of how prisoners ought to be handled,” says human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who was one of many first attorneys to be granted entry to detainees in Guantanamo Bay greater than 20 years in the past and has represented shoppers, together with Haroon, who’ve finally received their freedom from the jail.
“Whether or not it’s ISIS (ISIL) copying the orange uniforms, or different nations, together with Israel based on the UN, utilizing abusive interrogation strategies, all this may be traced again to the sordid instance of Guantanamo Bay and the opposite secret US prisons,” Stafford Smith says. “It’s properly previous time that the US admitted our dreadful errors, and insisted as soon as extra that each the US and the remainder of the world behave in a civilised method.”
Held with out cost
Of 9,500 political prisoners, greater than 3,500 Palestinians are being held with out cost in Israeli prisons. Whereas 1000’s have been already in jail earlier than the warfare on Gaza started in October final 12 months, many extra have been arrested or rearrested since then.
These detained with out cost might be held indefinitely by the Israeli navy for renewable intervals, based mostly on “secret proof” that neither the detainees nor their attorneys are permitted to see. Activists and human rights attorneys think about these folks to be hostages with no authorized recourse.
Others who’ve skilled related detentions, torture and abuse by the hands of US-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan agree with them.
Moazzam Begg is a human rights advocate who was imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for 3 years with out cost. He additionally attracts parallels with what Israelis name administrative detention beneath which Palestinians might be rounded up and denied authorized rights.
“There’s an evident parallel between Gaza and Guantanamo and the warfare on terror,” Begg says. “What you see from the therapy, from the stripping bare of the prisoners to the mistreatment of them, to the abuse of the spiritual and racial attributes. There’s completely a parallel. It’s plain.”
Begg says what occurred to him twenty years in the past, first in Afghanistan’s Bagram jail after which in Guantanamo, continues to be taking place. “I’ve returned to Afghanistan a number of instances. I’ve been again into the Bagram detention facility the place I used to be stripped bare, the place I used to be crushed. I used to be tied to different prisoners. I watched the abuse of different prisoners. I watched the homicide of different prisoners by American troopers.
“And people American troopers went on to do what they did from right here, nearly as a textbook copy in Abu Ghraib [the notorious prison in Iraq where US soldiers abused detainees in 2003 and 2004], what was finished to us in Guantanamo. Once more, the stripping, the merciless, inhuman and degrading therapy.”
Rights teams are demanding an pressing worldwide investigation to carry the perpetrators of torture and abuse of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons accountable.
Human rights group Euro-Med Monitor, which has documented the testimonies of former Palestinian prisoners, mentioned: “The knowledge gathered results in the conclusion that the Israeli military routinely and extensively commits crimes of arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, willful killing, torture, inhumane therapy, sexual violence, and denial of a good trial.
“Detainees have been additionally denied entry to meals and medical care, together with essential and life-saving care, have been spat and urinated upon, and have been subjected to different merciless and degrading acts and psychological abuse, together with threats of rape and demise, insults, and different types of sexual violence.”
Regardless of such requires justice from rights teams and attorneys, nevertheless, Begg says he’s not optimistic that issues will change within the close to future. “There’s no hope. I don’t see any hope in relation to worldwide regulation, in relation to the United Nations resolutions – multitudes of them have been violated.
“And the identical with Israel committing genocide, ethnic cleaning, the concentrating on of youngsters taking place at a time after we declare that human rights legal guidelines and worldwide regulation is throughout the board.”
