Palestinian Authority Tortured 96% of its Prisoners

Daniel Greenfield

“And then you throw them in jail on a parole violation, while claiming it had nothing to do with the movie.”

All this is not only paid for with American tax dollars, but those tax dollars paid for two decades of training the Palestinian Authority judiciary and “police” in proper judicial and law enforcement procedures.

An Arab human rights group based in London accused the Palestinian Authority of inhumane practices and human rights violations against Palestinian civilians in a scathing report published on Friday.
The Arab Organization for Human Rights has put the primary blame for the human rights abuses on PA President Mahmoud Abbas and called on the UN, Arab League and Organization of Islamic Cooperation to take urgent action.
AOHR monitored the practices of the PA’s security agencies from January to July 2012 and used information from victims detained by the PA, their families, eye-witnesses and local NGOs in its report.

It accused the PA of arbitrary actions against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank – including torture, detentions, interrogations and firing people from their jobs.
From June 2007 until the end of 2011, PA security forces detained 13,271 Palestinian citizens and 96 percent were subjected to various methods of torture, the report said. This resulted in the death of six detainees and caused “chronic illness” in others.
Between January and July 2012, PA security agencies detained 572 people and sent summonses to 770 more.
“Among them women and old people, who were often forced to wait from early morning to the evening before being interviewed.
Some were summonsed daily for weeks on end, others were kept under virtual house arrest. The period also witnessed raids against universities, hospitals and houses in order to arrest people wanted for protesting against the Israeli occupation. PA officers confiscated equipment and personal cash, which often went missing after the searches,” the group said.

It also said the PA was guilty of torture and degrading treatment, with 18.7 percent of a sample of 300 former detainees stating that they experienced “severe torture” and 99.7% claiming that they were exposed to degrading treatment.

“With regards to the effect of detention on the lives of the detainees, 60% of those in the study explained that they now suffer from chronic diseases due to torture and the poor conditions in which they were held in detention.
On another level, 60% confirmed that repeated or extensive detention reduced them to a state of acute poverty,” the report stated.
“A significant number of detainees are elderly people aged 60 and above, representing 11.3%; women made up 15.3%. Of the sample, 39.3% are students, 38% of whom confirmed that their studies were interrupted as a result of detention,” the report stated.
It calls on the PA to adhere to international law and conventions, and to declare that a future Palestinian state “must be set up on true bases built on the rights of the Palestinian citizen to life and freedom.”

The Palestinian Authority is obviously abusive and tyrannical, but the Arab Organization for Human Rights supports Hamas. And some of what it’s really complaining about are Palestinian Authority arrests of Hamas members in their ongoing civil war. But AOHR also has condemnations of Qatar, demonstrating that it’s not another Qatari puppet like Al Jazeera, and offers some strong condemnations of Morsi in Egypt, also showing its independence from the Muslim Brotherhood.