Democratic Palestine : 30 (ص 13)
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- Democratic Palestine : 30 (ص 13)
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Detentionand Expulsion
Despite broad international condemnation, Israeli repression has not
abated, even as the uprising has become an acknowledged permanent
state of affairs. The fact that the Zionist authorities continue to
escalate brutality against the masses, as the sole option for dealing
with their resistance, leads to a single conclusion: The only way to
end human rights violations in Palestine is to end the occupation.
The events of August in occupied
Palestine vividly demonstrated the
brutal measures employed by the oc-
cupation troops - mass beatings, deten-
tions, killings, curfews and expulsions.
Just as clearly, they showed that these
methods, despite inflicting great suf-
fering on the Palestinians, are essen-
tially futile. Each Zionist attack is met
by renewed mass struggle.
August 9th was a general strike day
in the 1967 occupied territories, to
mark the uprising’s entering its 9th
month. Israeli troops shot dead a
14-year-old in the West Bank, and in-
jured many others. The same day, a
Palestinian worker was burned to death
and two others injured, when the con-
struction shack they were staying in was
set afire; one of the injured later died.
A few days later, Palestinian political
detainees in Ketziot (Ansar III) began a
hunger strike protesting their
subhuman conditions. Israeli troops
opened fire, killing two detainees and
wounding three others. Then, on
August 18th, the Israeli authorities
banned the popular committees, ex-
pelled four Palestinian patriots and
issued expulsion orders for 25 more.
Demonstrations swept the occupied
territories protesting these outrages.
Facing the masses and further enraged
by a successful fire bomb attack that
injured seven Israelis in the Gaza Strip,
the occupation troops piled up new
Statistics of death and injury. Each day
in the second half of August, at least
one Palestinian martyr fell under the
soldiers’ gunfire; most of the victims
were young, including a 12-year-old
boy and a 9-year-old girl. Two Palesti-
hians died from teargas inhalation on
August 23-4th in the Gaza Strip, one of
them a 12-year-old girl. At least two
were beaten to death, one in prison.
Countless more were injured. On
August 17th alone, 100 Palestinians
were treated for beating injuries in
Shifa hospital in Gaza. Hospital of-
ficials stated that 90% of the victims
had been beaten in their homes by
Israeli soldiers supposedly searching
for stonethrowers. On August 22nd,
seventeen Palestinians were wounded
by Zionist gunfire in the Gaza Strip,
while 70 suffered beatings or teargas
inhalation. Meanwhile, the entire Gaza
population lived under a round-the-
clock curfew, as the Strip was closed
Palestinians expelled to Lebanon on April 19th.
off to journalists and UN food con-
voys; six major areas of the West Bank
were also under curfew. At the end of
August, relief workers termed this the
most difficult period since February,
due to the extended curfews and large
number of injured.
In the space available to us, it would
be impossible to chronicle all the Israeli
atrocities against Palestinians in this
period. Below we concentrate on two
aspects: expulsions and detentions.
ANSAR I, III, ETC.
Just as the first Ansar was spawned
by the Zionist attempt to wipe out the
PLO in Lebanon, so Ansar II arose
from the aim of quelling mass
resistance in the occupied Gaza Strip
over the past few years. With the onset
of the uprising, it was inevitable that
Ansar III would be born in accordance
with the Zionist dictum that it is illegal
to be a Palestinian in Palestine, thus the
need for concentration camps. On
August 29th, Rabin stated that 18,000.
had been arrested in the course of the
uprising.
By singling out the two Ansars in
occupied Palestine, we are not implying
that Palestinian political prisoners
receive anything like acceptable treat-
ment in other Zionist jails where torture
is systematic. But what is typical of
these detention centers, as well as Al
Fara’a and Dhahiriya in the occupied
West Bank, is that they are under the
control of the Zionist army rather than
the prison administration. Thus, ihe
detainees are not even formally
guaranteed the rights specified in the
Geneva Conventions, nor the minimal
things for which Palestinian political
prisoners have struggled for over a
decade. Lawyers have even fewer legal
straws to grasp at in trying to defend
their clients, and most of the detainees
at these centers have no lawyers at all,
not to mention family or Red Cross
visits. It is typical at such centers that
the detainees are imprisoned without
trial or knowing why they were ar-
rested.
Keeping these centers with this status
is obviously intentional on the part of
the Zionist authorities, for it meets
their need for preventive and group
detention without fulfilling normal
judicial requirements of presenting
charges and evidence. Anita Vitullo, a
free-lance journalist based in
Jerusalem, recently wrote a book on
Ansar II, in which she relates that due
to this situation, Gazans regard deten- >
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