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RAMALLAH, West Bank – A West Bank reporter was arrested for four days by Palestinian Authority security forces after taking photos on his mobile phone of the Palestinian PM convoy stuck at an Israeli-controlled checkpoint .
An activist in Gaza said Hamas security forces arrested him 15 days after writing an article on Facebook protesting the lack of electricity, asking group leaders if their children were sleeping on the tiles to escape heat, like his.
Citing these and other cases in a report released Tuesday, Human Rights Watch, the New York-based rights organization, blamed the West-backed Palestinian Authority and its rival, Hamas, the militant Islamist group that controls Gaza, to regularly resort to arbitrary methods. arrest and torture as tools to crush dissent.
The systematic practice of torture by both authorities could constitute a crime against humanity and could be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the report said.
On Tuesday, spokesmen for the Palestinian Authority and Hamas internal security forces described the group's report as biased and inaccurate.
Adnan Damiri, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, said the report was "very biased and full of misinformation".
In an annex to the report, security agencies in both Palestinian territories argued that the violations occurred only in isolated cases where the perpetrators had been investigated and had been investigated. to answer for their actions.
Human Rights Watch said the evidence gathered contradicted these claims.
At a press conference in Ramallah, Omar Shakir, director of Human Rights Watch for Israel and Palestine, and senior researcher of the report, said, "The abuses occur. When abuses occur, those who commit them must be held responsible. When you have impunity, the abuses continue. Impunity has prevailed for a quarter of a century. "
Tom Porteous, deputy program director at Human Rights Watch, said that 25 years after the Oslo peace agreement, "the Palestinian authorities have only got limited power in the West Bank. and in Gaza, but yet, when they have autonomy, they have developed parallel police states. "
"Palestinian officials' calls to protect Palestinian rights ring hollow when they crush dissent," he added.
Most of the charges are not new. Human Rights Watch drew attention to what he called "the perilous state of human rights in Palestinian areas of self-government" in a report on Israeli and Palestinian violations in 1995. Journalists and human rights organizations have documented many cases since then.
But the 149-page report released Tuesday, which had been in development for two years, relied on the testimony of more than 140 witnesses, including former detainees, their relatives, and their lawyers. , and also reviewed medical records and court documents. Human Rights Watch detailed more than two dozen cases of people who she said were "detained for no specific purpose other than writing a critical article or Facebook message, or belonging to the wrong group." students or the wrong political movement ". The detentions often lasted several days or weeks, and the purpose of the authorities' actions, said the pressure group, was to punish critics and deter further activism.
Human Rights Watch also reported systematic abuses, including beatings, whipping, and in particular, a form of torture known as "shabeh" in Arabic, in which detainees have long been contorted in stressful positions that cause pain but rarely leave traces.
Human Rights Watch called on countries providing assistance to various security agencies accused of such abuses to suspend this portion of their assistance.
Palestinian analysts have long noted the growing autocracy of the Palestinian octogenarian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in his struggle to quell real and perceived rivals, and competition between his Palestinian authority led by Fatah and Hamas has resulted in many arrests. .
In Ramallah, Palestinians, who were questioned about authority, said they did not dare to speak in public, snapping their fingers to suggest that expressing criticism could drive them off the street. Unauthorized demonstrations were brutally dispersed. In the Hamas-led Gaza Strip, authorities have long been accused of intimidating journalists and critics.
In response to questions raised by Human Rights Watch, one of the West Bank's security agencies, the Preventive Security Service, said that 220 Palestinians had been arrested as a result of social media posts, because of the fact that they had been arrested. they "were outside the field of criticism and opinions expressed". and could have "endangered the lives of citizens".
Jihad Barakat, the West Bank reporter who photographed the Palestinian prime minister, was eventually acquitted of any inappropriate or illegal behavior by a Ramallah court.
Amer Balousha, the activist in Gaza who complained about the heat, was summoned for the first time because he was suspected of inciting hatred after calling people to protest and to then released. He was later arrested for another unspecified "criminal" charge, according to Hamas security forces.
The Israeli authorities have so far refused to allow Human Rights Watch to enter Gaza to present its report. And in a twist, the report comes as Mr. Shakir, an American citizen, fights an Israeli deportation order after the authorities decided to revoke his work visa under a controversial law of 2017 banning the entry of people who encouraged the boycott by Israel.
The Israeli authorities have accused Human Rights Watch of anti-Israeli bias in the past and have filed a case against Shakir, who documents his activities in support of a boycott, mainly before joining the rights group. The file also mentions a 2016 report by Human Rights Watch, which called on businesses to stop activities that benefited Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
