Charlotte Silver: How Israel Gets Away With Torturing

Palestinians to Death? Six days after Arafat Jaradat was arrested by the Israeli army and the Shin Bet, he was dead. Between the date of his arrest, February 18, and the day of his death, February 23, his lawyer Kamil Sabbagh met with Arafat only once: in front of a military judge at the Shin Bet's Kishon interrogation facility. Sabbagh reported that when he saw Jaradat, the man was terrified. Arafat told his lawyer that he was in acute pain from being beaten and forced to sit in stress positions with his hands bound behind his back. When it announced his death, Israeli Prison Service claimed Arafat, who leaves a pregnant widow and two children, died from cardiac arrest. However, the subsequent autopsy found no blood clot in his heart. In fact, the autopsy found no blood clot in his heart. In fact, the autopsy concluded that Arafat, who turned 30 this year, was in fine cardiovascular health. What the final autopsy did find, however, was that Jaradat had been pummeled by repeated blows to his chest and body, and had sustained a total of six broken bones in his spine, arms and legs, his lips lacerated, his face badly bruised. The ordeal that Arafat suffered before he died at the hands of Israel's Shin Bet, is common to many Palestinians that pass through Israel's prisons. According to the prisoners' rights organization Addameer, since 1967, a total of 72 Palestinians have been killed as a result of torture, and 53 due to medical neglect. Less than a month before Jaradat was killed, Ashraf Abu Dhra died while in Israeli custody, in a case that Addameer argues was a direct result of medical neglect. The legal impunity of the Shin Bet, commonly referred to as the GSS, and its torture techniques has been well established. Between 2001 and 2011, 700 Palestinians lodged complaints with the State Attorney's Office, but not a single one has been criminally investigated. Writing in Adalah's 2012 publication, On Torture, PDF, Bana Shougry Badame, an attorney and the Legal Director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, wrote, "The GSS's impunity is absolute." Israel's High Court has been extravagantly helpful in securing the Shin Bet with its imperviousness to accountability to international law, and thus enabling widespread and lethal torture. In the first week of February, two weeks before Arafat was killed, the High Court of Justice threw out Adalah's petition, that demanded the GSS videotape and audio record all of its interrogations, in order to comply with requirements of the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT), to which Israel is a signatory.