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Date of birth: 20 May 1990 Early in 2008 a Palestinian teenager was arrested under suspicion of stone-throwing. When he would not confess to the crime, both his parents were arrested in an attempt to coerce an admission of guilt out of him. He was arrested and detained a second time two weeks later, during which he was beaten and tortured. DCI/PS strongly condemns the Israeli authorities’ treatment of Gheith, amounting to physical and psychological torture, and further denounces his arrest and detention as arbitrary and illegal. When his ordeal began, Gheith* , 17, was asleep in his family home in the Old City of Jerusalem. At around midnight on 27 January 2008, the house was suddenly surrounded by the Israeli army, border police and intelligence personnel. They knocked repeatedly on the door, and when Gheith's father answered, one of them identified himself as 'Ariel', the head of the ISA (Israeli Security Agency, formerly known as the GSS) in Jerusalem. He told Gheith's father he wanted to speak with him and his son, so Gheith's father asked him into their home. He went to wake his son and brought him into their living room where Ariel was waiting with three other plain clothed ISA officers. As they sat down Ariel began questioning Gheith about an incident that had occurred the day before in which a police station was vandalized and security cameras broken from stones thrown at them. Gheith told him he had nothing to do with it. The questioning lasted 40-45 minutes, at which point Ariel told Gheith's father that he wanted to continue the interrogation at al-Qashla police station. They arrested Gheith, handcuffed him, put him in a civilian car and took him to the police station. When he arrived at al-Qashla police station he was put in a room with two intelligence officers in civilian clothes, and stayed there for about 30 minutes. He was then transferred to another room, where an interrogator was waiting for him, whom the others called 'Imad'. Imad questioned him about the incident at the police station the day before and about what he had done that day in general, and again Gheith denied any involvement. The interrogation lasted for three hours, until 4:00am. He then signed a statement written in Hebrew, confirming what he had said to them, and was transferred to al-Maskobieh, a different police station, to sleep. The next morning, a man claiming to be an interrogator from al-Qashla came to Gheith's family home and said he wanted both of Gheith’s parents to come in for interrogation. Gheith's father told him that his wife was ill and could not come, but that he would go by himself. He then left for al-Qashla. Half an hour later, a group of border police and other men in plain clothes showed up at Gheith's house. They put the children into one room and began searching the entire house. Gheith's mother then called her husband, who was still on his way to al-Qashla, to let him know what was happening. He immediately returned home, where he found the border police recklessly searching every room in the house. Gheith's father asked one of them what they were doing and was told that they had an order to search the house and bring him and his wife in for questioning. They were then placed in a civilian car and brought to al-Qashla. When they arrived they were placed in different rooms. An interrogator came into the room where they were keeping Gheith's father and tried to convince him to speak to his son and get him to confess. Gheith's father said that he would speak to his son but that he would tell him to say exactly what happened, and nothing more. When they brought him in to see his son, Gheith told him that he knew nothing about what they were interrogating him about. He stayed with him for 20 minutes and was taken out into the hallway. After he left, the interrogator told him that his father was going to be imprisoned. Gheith's mother, in the meantime, had been waiting in a room by herself. Soon a man entered and began yelling at her, asking questions about what her son was wearing when he was arrested. She told him she did not remember, and that on the evening of the alleged offence her son was at a party for one of the prisoners. They then tied her hands and told her that she would be kept under arrest until the following day. A few hours after having gone to sleep, Gheith was woken up in his cell at al-Maskobieh and taken to the Alsoloh (the lower court), where the judge extended his detention for 24 hours. He was then taken back to al-Qashla and placed in an interrogation room with two new interrogators. One of them began pushing him, and then tried to bite his shoulder, but he was able to get out of the way, at which point they started insulting him. His aggressor then left the room and the remaining interrogator turned to him and told him not to upset the man in the uniform, because if he did so he would get hurt. The interrogator then told him that he would arrest his parents and that Gheith would be forced to watch as they were imprisoned. Gheith then said he knew the interrogator was just trying to scare him. “We will see,” he responded. The officers holding Gheith's mother had by this point tied her hands in preparation to present her to her son. When they brought her into the room where they were holding Gheith one of them announced “Look at your mother, I told you I would imprison her.” The officer then threw Gheith's mother's identity card at him and removed her from the room, without having let a word pass between mother and son. The officers then untied her hands and brought her into another room where a man she hadn't seen before came in and started telling her about the many things her son had supposedly done. He told her they wanted her to talk to Gheith and convince him to tell the truth. She said that she didn't know anything, but that she would go and see her son. When she was led back to see Gheith, he was speaking calmly to another man, who told her that they could switch his case from a military to a civil one and have him released immediately. He then said to Gheith: “This is your mother, talk to her,” and left the room. She then began to ask Gheith about how he was doing, but another officer came in, and Gheith told her to take her ID and go home. She was given back her ID card and brought out into the hallway. Her husband was waiting there and they left together. After his parents left, Gheith was brought into a room with a concrete bed, and after two hours of sleep he was taken to another interrogation room where he was accused of being a member of Hizbullah because of a flag they had found while searching his house. He denied any involvement with the group. The questioning continued for an hour, after which he was brought back to the room with the bed, where he slept for another two hours. They then woke him up and continued to press him about his political beliefs “Why do you have Fateh flags, and green [Hamas] flags?” one of the interrogators asked. He responded that he had acquired them at weddings and concerts. They then let him go back to sleep. At midnight he was taken back to court where the prosecutor requested that he be released on the condition that he not be allowed to enter the Old City, his place of residence, for 60 days. The judge refused and ordered that he be released without conditions. Two hours later he was released from al-Qashla. His ordeal, however, was far from over. Two weeks later the army again stormed his house in the middle of the night. When they found him they put a black sack over his head and tied his hands behind his back. They then put a jacket around his neck and used it to lead him from his house towards their vehicles. Along the way he was kicked in the stomach, and when he fell to the ground they continued kicking him. He was then placed on the floor of a car, and during the ride that ensued his body was stomped on by the men who arrested him. When they arrived at their destination, the now familiar al-Qashla police station, he was put in a room where he was beaten all over his body by several people. When they removed the bag from his head he saw a man dressed in civilian clothing whom the others referred to as Kobi. Gheith recognised the name, as this man had a reputation among ex-detainees for being particularly abusive. Again they accused him of breaking the security cameras, and Kobi punched him in the face and hit his feet. He grabbed the skin on his chest and twisted it violently, causing him great pain. He was then moved out into the hallway where each person who walked by took turns beating him. He was moved back to al-Maskobieh where he was detained for the night, and the next morning was taken back to court, where he was released on a bail of NIS 1500 and sentenced to three days house arrest. During his house arrest he was constantly watched by the police and his house was raided multiple times to ensure that he had not left. After his house arrest, his father took him to the hospital for treatment as he still had bruises all over his legs. Even though Gheith is no longer in detention, the experience casts a pall over his hopes for the future. He remains free on bail but his trial date has been set for 18 June 2008, a date that is never far from his mind. Gheith is in his last year of secondary school, and like all Palestinian children in his situation, he knows he has to study throughout the course of the entire year to succeed in his final Tawjihi exams. Needless to say, thoughts of his impending trial have distracted him from his studies, resulting in diminished academic performance. He now questions the sense in taking the exams at all, as he fears that even if he does write and pass them, which is not certain given the disruptions the trial could cause and the threat of incarceration thereafter, he will not be allowed to leave the West Bank to continue his studies because of his previous arrests. His legal problems have also adversely affected his social life. Whereas he formerly spent his free time engaged in Dabka (traditional Arab folk dancing), and at coffee houses with friends, Gheith now rarely goes out and spends much of his time alone. The actions perpetrated against Gheith during his arrest, interrogation and detention violate the rights afforded to him under international law. Article 37 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) clearly states that children may not be subjected to “torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Furthermore, Article 2(2) of the United Nations Convention against Torture (UNCAT) states that “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political in stability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” Article 4(1,2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights contains the same provision, establishing freedom from torture as a non-derogable right, even in time of “public emergency which threatens the life of the nation”. Therefore, the absolute prohibition against torture has become a principle of customary international law as jus cogens; i.e., a prohibition of a higher nature, overriding all others. International definition of torture Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. (UNCAT, Article 1) Despite this, the treatment Gheith received at the hands of his captors squarely fits the international definition of torture, in both a physical sense, from the beatings he received, and psychologically, from the threats the police made and carried out against his family. The arrest of family members brings extreme psychological pressure and a terrible burden of guilt onto prisoners, who tend to sign confessions in order to protect their loved ones. Psychological torture has been widely condemned by rights groups around the world, and the Public Committee against Torture in Israel (PCATI) recently released a report detailing several cases over the past year of the use of the arrest of family members, or the threat thereof, to elicit confessions from suspects. Upon being questioned by the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee about these allegations, the head of the ISA's interrogation department admitted to using these methods of interrogation, but only in one instance. On this occasion, a detainee attempted suicide several times after his wife and father were arrested and shown to him dressed in prison clothes. According to representatives of the ISA, this case prompted a decision to put an end to arresting innocent family members to extract confessions from suspected criminals, but the fact that PCATI presented documented evidence of six such cases over the past year casts doubt over the ISA's claims that the implementation practices were limited to one occasion. Not only do these arrests and threats amount to psychological torture for the suspect, but they are a violation of the rights of their family members – innocents subjected to arbitrary arrest and detention. DCI/PS condemns this practice in the strongest possible terms, and calls on the international community and States Parties to the UN Convention against Torture and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to denounce and voice their opposition to the use of torture by the Israeli authorities. *Full name of the victim withheld to ensure privacy and safety of the victim.
Place of residence: Jerusalem
Date of arrest: 27 January 2008
Charge: Stone throwing and damage of property
Place of detention: Al-Qashla police station and al-Maskobieh police station