Nancy Murray reports about the recent trip she co-led with Eyewitness Palestine:
Brutality and complicity have sustained this military occupation for 55 years
We heard about the killing of the prominent Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh shortly before our meeting with Sahar Francis, the head of Addameer, the Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. Sahar had been a close friend of the Al Jazeera journalist for two decades.
The tragic news of Abu Akleh being gunned down by what sounds like a sniper’s bullet to the neck while she was covering the latest Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp wearing a helmet and protective vest bearing the word PRESS is another reminder of how little Palestinian life matters to the military occupiers of this captive land.
Addameer is one of the six well-known human rights organizations given a ‘terrorist’ designation by Israel late last year in an effort to silence the most widely respected voices of Palestinian civil society, even as it has snuffed out the lives of over 40 Palestinian journalists since 2000 who had been attempting to let the world know what was happening here.
“When we try to use the international mechanisms like going to the International Criminal Court and submittig reports to UN bodies about torture and other human rights violations we are called a terrorist organization,” Sahar told us. “But we believe it cannot last forever, and one day this settler colonial regime will end.”
We heard about the grim conditions endured by 4,500 Palestinian political prisoners, 160 of whom are children, and about Israel’s use of indefinite imprisonment without charges or trial, known as ‘administrative detention.’ Currently there are 130 Palestinians detained indefinitely, on ‘evidence’ they can neither see nor challenge in a court.
Sahar talked about the violence meted out by the military during middle-of-the-night raids on homes, and the physical and psychological torture inflicted on prisoners during interrogation when they can be held in solitary confinement for 60 days before seeing a lawyer. She told us that although torture had been outlawed by the Israeli High Court in 1999 except in ‘ticking bomb’ scenarios, that loophole is now expanding and used widely in cases where there is no potential threat. This is happening despite the fact that Israel is a member of the Convention Against Torture.
She described the circle of complicity of doctors, the military courts, prosecutors and the Ministry of Health, all of which support the oppression of Palestinians and make no attempt to document or properly investigate torture cases, even when such treatment leads to a death. “Even in those rare cases when Addameer succeeds in pressuring for a proper investigation, at the end of the day, Israel finds a way around all efforts at holding it accountable.”
We heard about the terrible health conditions in prisons, the fact that prisoners cannot have phone calls with their families for ‘security’ reasons, the confiscation of books when prisoners try to educate themselves, and the refusal of Israel to allow 66-year-old Karim Younis to be present for a few hours at the funeral of his mother. Younis, who has been incarcerated for 40 years, was one of the prisoners who was supposed to have been released in the post-Oslo period, but the Israeli government failed to do it.
Despite the fact that Sahar holds a US visa that is valid for another year, the US last week banned her from transiting the country to attend the World Social Forum in Mexico.
No sooner had our meeting ended than we heard that Israeli soldiers had just shot a live bullet into the heart of 18-year-old Thayer Khalil Yazouri not far from where we were. They claim he was throwing stones, which now merits a death sentence.
This is what the Apartheid Occupation looks like.
The May 2022 Eyewitness Palestine delegation in Jerusalem.