Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
13 March
HORRIFIC TORTURE SANCTIONED BY ISRAELI AUTHORITIES
On this day in 2000, Mustafa Dirani’s Israeli lawyer alleged his Lebanese client had been raped by a soldier brought in specifically for this purpose, sodomized by the head of the interrogation team, and forced to wear diapers after being fed laxatives. Dirani’s interrogator in the secret prison ‘Facility 1391’ was sacked. Dozens of other interrogators signed a petition objecting to his punishment for using methods they said were sanctioned by the authorities.
تقر السلطات الإسرائيلية التعذيب المروع
13 مارس
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 2000 ، زعم المحامي الإسرائيلي لمصطفى الديراني أن موكله اللبناني تعرض للاغتصاب من قبل جندي تم إحضاره خصيصًا لهذا الغرض ، واغتصبه رئيس فريق الاستجواب ، وأُجبر على ارتداء حفاضات بعد إطعامه أدوية مسهلة. أقيل محقق الديراني في سجن "منشأة 1391" السري. ووقع العشرات من المحققين الآخرين على وثيقة تعترض على عقوبته لاستخدامه أساليب قالوا إنها حظيت بموافقة السلطات.
Camp 1391: ‘I would pray that I’d die’
Mustafa Dirani, once a leader of the Lebanese militia group Amal, had been held in Israeli prisons since he was abducted from his home in the Bekaa Valley by commandoes [in 1994]...
Dirani returned to Lebanon as part of a prisoner exchange, mediated by Germany, between Israel and Hizbullah...
Dirani presented a horrifying account of his treatment by the army. He said that after he was captured six soldiers stripped him naked, shackled him and brutally interrogated him around the clock on the whereabouts of Arad.
Interrogators alternately splashed him with hot and freezing water, shook him until he fainted, squeezed his testicles, sodomised him and sexually assaulted him with a stick, he said. “I would pray that I’d die.” He accused an army intelligence officer known to him only as “Major George” of coordinating the torture.
Dirani testified that one uniformed soldier named Kojak was ordered to force him down on to a bench. “I couldn’t see or resist … I was raped by the soldier. He said he would rape me, and he did,” he told the court.
[Details of the torture are given in the article]
Dirani’s account has been confirmed by several former soldiers who served at the same prison. One has said: “I know that it was customary to threaten to insert a stick if the subject did not talk.”
A petition signed last year by 60 officers in defence of “George” does not deny that such practices were employed, only that it is unfair to victimise him for using working methods standard in military intelligence. “George” has also admitted that it was normal practice for detainees to be naked while being interrogated.
...a video was handed to Israeli television showing a former interrogator whose identity was concealed talking about George. “I remember one instance that I still feel until today, which makes me shudder, in which a baton was used — not for hitting,” he said. “Even in the field, George did what he wanted, in front of my eyes and the eyes of everyone else.”
Dirani, along with Obeid, was being held in a secret, army-run prison when the abuse took place. Facility 1391, as it is officially known, is Israel’s version of the controversial Camp X- Ray jail in Guantanamo Bay (the jail where the United States is holding Afghan, Taliban and Al-Qa’eda prisoners).
Located next to a kibbutz on the Wadi Ara road, halfway between the northern city of Hadera and the Arab town of Umm Al- Fahm, Facility 1391 has never been visited by the Red Cross and the number of prisoners held there is unknown. It is used for interrogating foreign nationals, mainly Arabs, outside the rules of international law. Such prisoners are effectively made to “disappear”.
In a revealing moment during last week’s prisoner exchange, Moroccan officials expressed surprise at the news that the deal included three Moroccans, none of whom was reported to be a political prisoner. A Moroccan human rights activist, Khaled Al- Soufyani, was reported saying: “We have no clear information about these three prisoners. Even Hizbullah knows nothing about them.”
Dirani, Israel admitted last year after legal action by local human rights groups, was held in secret detention for eight years...prisoners like Dirani and Obeid were being held in secret, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
[An Israeli lawyer] located 19 missing Lebanese youths, aged between 15 and 16, who were being detained in a secret wing of a civilian prison in Beersheva in the Negev. All were being held without charge as administrative detainees after their abduction by Christian Phalangists in Lebanon. They had been “sold” on to Israel as bargaining chips in 1986. It took five years for Israeli lawyer Reich to make the story of the Lebanese youths public, and a further three years before they were finally freed by the courts.
Dalia Kerstein, the director of Hamoked, an Israeli human rights group that has been tracking Palestinians who were briefly held in Facility 1391 after a round of mass arrests following the army’s invasion of the West Bank in the spring of 2002, believed Israel was toruring Iraqis there for the US.
“Israel has decades of expertise in torturing and interrogating Arab prisoners — exactly the skills the Americans now need since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq...It would be quite astounding if Israel, the US’s most loyal ally wasn’t offering its services to the US,” says Kerstein.
2-minute video: Israeli police have been using a "torture room” at Nazareth police station to terrorise Palestinians. Protesters, minors, bystanders and even attorneys have reportedly been tortured there.
(https://youtu.be/SH3zMkHjQvQ)