13-09-2014 - Israel jailed influential Palestinian writer to remove him from society. Prominent Palestinian professor and writer Ahmad Qatamesh spent a total of eight and a half years in Israeli prison without being charged or brought to trial. During two separate stints in Israeli lockup, Qatamesh was held in administrative detention, a draconian practice in which Israel imprisons Palestinians for infinitely renewable six-month terms without charge or trial, using “secret evidence” against them. “Administrative detention is one of the most difficult of Israel’s tactics because prisoners have nothing but uncertainty,” Qatamesh told The Electronic Intifada. “They never know when or if they will go home, and neither do their families.” Sitting in the living room of his home in al-Bireh, a central West Bank city near Ramallah, the veteran prisoner explained the Israeli occupation’s use of administrative detention as a method of targeting influential Palestinians — resistance and civil society figures alike. As one of those who has been targeted multiple times, Qatamesh rejects Israel’s claim that administrative detention is used solely as a security measure. Indeed, it was used to collectively punish Palestinians in the West Bank after three Israeli teens, later found slain, went missing there in June. Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and present-day Israel were arrested during the popular demonstrations that followed the nationalist-motivated 2 July kidnapping and brutal murder of Muhammad Abu Khudair, a sixteen-year-old Palestinian from Jerusalem. As of 7 August, that arrest campaign had resulted in the number of prisoners held in administrative detention soaring to an estimated 450, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society. Though arrests have continued since then, these are the latest available statistics. There have been numerous hunger strikes in Israeli jails undertaken by Palestinian detainees in recent years in a bid to demand their freedom. Dozens of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails across the occupied West Bank and Israel agreed in June to end a mass hunger strike against administrative detention. “Secret evidence” Qatamesh, who has spent a total of thirteen years in Israeli prison, was first arrested and locked up for four and a half years in the 1970s for charges related to activism with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a secular Marxist political party deemed illegal by Israel. “These years were easier than later on,” he recalled. “We still had the hope to liberate the homeland.” When he was rearrested in 1992, he was accused of “illegal activities” as an organizer and leader in the PFLP, a charge he denies until today. Rather than bring charges against him, Israel instead put him in administrative detention and barred him and his lawyer from seeing the secret evidence against him. Israeli intelligence were apparently unable to prove his involvement in any illegal activities despite three months of interrogation, during which Qatamesh says he was tortured. Though a military judge decided that he ought to be released shortly after the interrogation period ended, it would be six and a half years before that order was carried out. During his more than six years of detention in the 1990s, Qatamesh says that “Israeli interrogators and secret intelligence used very specific types of torture — not punching, but psychological pressure, [such as] isolation and sleep deprivation,” among other techniques.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 09:20:05 +0000
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