B. Detention and abuse of AD/02
1123. AD/02 was interviewed by the Mission on 1 July 2009. He is a resident of Beit Lahia and
a businessman. He was detained on 4 January 2009 for around 85 days. In that period he was
held in Beersheba and Negev prisons, after being detained in locations identified as military
posts. He was mentally and physically abused. He appeared before what appeared to be a
criminal court, but the precise nature of the proceedings and their results were never made clear
to him. He was released without explanation and returned to the Erez border and told to re-enter
Gaza.
1124. By 3 January AD/02 and his extended family, numbering over 200, had gathered together
in Beit Lahia as a result of the attacks that were taking place in the area. At around 4 a.m. on 4
January Israeli troops entered the area shooting. They ordered everyone out of the house and
separated the men from the women and children. They selected 15 of the men, without asking for
names. The women and children were ordered to go south. AD/02 recounted that the 15 men,
including him, were separated from the other men and were blindfolded and handcuffed with
plastic strips.554 They were taken on foot to an open space half a kilometre away. An hour later,
they were taken to a house where they were joined by an estimated 54 or 55 people, who
apparently also wore blindfolds.
1125. AD/02 described how they were interrogated in a separate room, individually and at
times in groups of two or three. He stated that some of the men, though not him, were beaten
during the interrogation and were made to clamber down into trenches or pits, dug in the ground
outside the house, big enough to accommodate one person. They were kept in the pits for several
hours at a time, handcuffed and blindfolded, with no access to toilets.
1126. Later that night, 15 people – four women and at least 11 children – were brought to the
house. They were detained overnight in the corridor outside the room where the men were
detained. The next morning, on 4 January, the men, women and children were taken out of the
house to an open space. The men remained blindfolded and handcuffed. AD/02 stated that the
open space was a military post with many tanks and soldiers. They were all told to sit in the
middle of the empty space. A fence of barbed wire was then erected around them. They sat
within the barbed enclosure all day and all night in close proximity to the movement and sound
of military tanks.
1127. AD/02 stated that 18 to 20 other men were held overnight in an open truck, exposed to
the cold and rain. AD/02 knew this from talking to some of the men the following morning.555
1128. On 5 January, 18 to 20 men, not including AD/02, were taken from the military post to an
unknown location.556 AD/02 and 35 others were taken to an area described by him as located
north of Gaza City and in Israel. They remained handcuffed and blindfolded for an hour and a
half. Then a roll-call was taken, their blindfolds removed and they were interrogated by a person
who identified himself as an intelligence officer. Shortly afterwards, AD/02 and a few others
(exact number not known) were interviewed by a group of people identifying themselves as part
of a television crew. AD/02 does not know the name and/or details of the television channel.
They were then led to an open space, where they stayed all evening exposed to the rain and cold.
Later that night (5–6 January) they were blindfolded and shackled with chains and taken to a
location which AD/02 subsequently learned was the Beersheba prison facility. A few hours later,
at dawn, their blindfolds and handcuffs were removed.
1129. AD/02 recounted that he was in extreme pain as the handcuffs were very tight, adding to
the pain caused by pre-existing injuries to his hands and wrist. Earlier in his life, he had suffered
serious burns and the scarring on his hands and arms is evident. There is continued nerve damage
to the skin tissue which causes significant pain in cold weather. His gloves were taken away by
soldiers during an interrogation, exposing his hands to the extreme cold. His requests for medical
assistance were ignored several times before his arrival in Beersheba, where he was given access
to a doctor. He was, however, given only a non-medicated lotion.
1130. AD/02 stated that he was detained in Beersheba for approximately a week. He was
intermittently kept in isolation and then in a courtyard with several other detainees. In one
instance, he was blindfolded, handcuffed and shackled, and interrogated for approximately two
hours by three people. He was verbally abused and beaten during the interrogation, his hair was
pulled and he was kicked with one of the interrogators attempting to push his boots through the
loop of the handcuffs tied around his wrists.
1131. On or around 13 January, pursuant to an interrogation by a person dressed in civilian
clothes, AD/02 was blindfolded and handcuffed and taken to the Negev prison. He remained
there until the end of March. During this time he was transferred at least 10 times from one cell
to another.
1132. On arrival his handcuffs were removed and he was taken to a ward, which consisted of
small one-man cells with iron doors and no windows. The cells each contained an iron bench.
Two hours later, he was blindfolded and taken to an interrogation room, where he was stripped
and made to stand alone, naked, for almost an hour before his clothes were returned and he was
handcuffed and shackled. He was taken by four people to another room, where he was beaten
with the butt of a rifle while also being kicked and punched several times. The beating lasted for
about 30 minutes. He was then left alone in the room for about 2 hours. He was then taken to a
large communal space referred by the soldiers as the “tents.” There were seven or eight such
spaces or tents spread across the prison.
1133. AD/02 said that he was unable to stand owing to the severe injuries sustained during the
beatings and had to be carried to the tents. He was taken to a doctor, given some medicines and
allowed to take a shower. AD/02 stated that he stayed in the tent area for about a week before
being transferred to a cell occupied by four people. The cell had an iron bed and a bunk bed.
Two people including AD/02 slept on the floor. The cell was dark and filthy. There was no clean
water and no toilet. During the entire week the men had to relieve themselves in the cell, which
was never cleaned.
1134. AD/02 remained in the cell for about one week. At some time during this period he was
taken, blindfolded, handcuffed and shackled, by bus to what appeared to be a court. On arrival,
his handcuffs and blindfold were removed. He remained shackled when he was taken inside the
courtroom. The courtroom had a standard layout with the judge seated behind a table in the
centre of the room. The prosecution was on one side and the defence on the other. They were all
dressed in civilian clothes. Once inside the courtroom, AD/02 was made to sign a consent form,
accepting the lawyer reportedly appointed to defend him. Although the lawyer identified himself
as belonging to a human rights organization, he gave no name. As the proceedings began, the
judge addressed AD/02 and read out the charge against him. The judge announced that he was
being charged with being an illegal combatant but did not explain specific charges. AD/02 was
asked no questions. When the defence lawyer asked for the charge to be elaborated, the judge
replied that the charges were part of a secret dossier and could not be elaborated upon or
revealed. The proceeding lasted about 30 minutes and AD/02 was taken back to Negev.
1135. A week later, around or on 28 January, AD/02 was transferred to another section of the
prison, where roll-calls and strip searches were carried out regularly. Some 8 to 10 days later,
around 7 February, he and 14 others, were moved to a larger ward with prisoners from the West
Bank. The ICRC was given access to them.
1136. On 8 February, AD/02 was transferred, twice, to another section of the prison and shortly
afterwards to the cell where he had first been detained on arrival at Negev. On 9 February, at
around noon, he and several others were transferred, for the ninth time, to another section of the
prison occupied by a large number of prisoners, including those from the West Bank. AD/02
indicated that several of them were parliamentarians. He remained in this section for
approximately 20 days. During this time he three times met a person who identified himself as a
lawyer. He was informed of the charges against him, which included membership and
involvement with the resistance.
1137. On 2 March, he was transferred with 10 others to yet another section of the prison. They
were put in two rooms, five in each room. The rooms had graffiti on the wall that read illegal
combatants in English and in Hebrew. They had limited access to toilets and were given
uncooked food to eat.
1138. Around 29–30 March, AD/02 was finally released. He and his brother, a cousin and two
other residents of Izbat Abd Rabbo were blindfolded and handcuffed and taken to the Erez
border, where they were interrogated for approximately four hours. They were then told to cross
the border and not look back. They were given no explanation about either their detention or
their release.
C. AD/03
1139. AD/03 is a resident of al-Salam neighbourhood, east of Jabaliyah and close to the eastern
border with Israel. His arrest and detention were preceded by aerial attacks and a ground
invasion in his neighbourhood. His house was struck several times, over a period of five days, by
projectiles fired from F-16 aircraft. The attacks continued throughout the night when most
people were asleep.557 As a result of the continued attacks, he sought refuge in a relative’s house
nearby.
1140. AD/03 stated that, although the area could be considered as a frontline where armed
groups had been present, the neighbourhood could not reasonably have been perceived as a
military threat by the time the Israeli armed forces arrived on the ground. There was no
resistance going on in the neighbourhood when it was targeted. If the intent of the attacks was to
destroy alleged command centres, positions or weapons caches of Hamas, he felt that those
positions would have been destroyed in the first few attacks on the neighbourhood given the
intensity of the shelling.
1141. On 8 January, at around 11.30 a.m., the house where AD/03 was seeking refuge was
struck by a missile so he decided to return to his own house. He described how Israeli soldiers
fired at them, including women and children carrying white flags, when they tried to leave his
cousin’s house. His father’s wife sustained a bullet injury to her leg. Thirty minutes later, around
noon, the Israeli armed forces ordered all residents to evacuate their homes and come out in the
street. The men were separated from the women and children, and told to line up against a wall,
lift their shirts and strip to their underwear. They remained stripped and lined up against the wall
for approximately 15 minutes. The men, women and children were then told to walk down the
street.
1142. AD/03 recounted that the street was blocked with large piles of heavy rubble and debris
of bulldozed buildings, which provided a difficult obstacle for several people, including children
and elderly people. They walked 200-250 metres before arriving at a house. Two hours later the
women and children were told to go to Jabaliyah. Shortly afterwards, AD/03, his brother, cousin
and an unknown man were taken to another room, where they were forced to lie on the ground.
They were then blindfolded and their hands were tied behind their backs with plastic strips. They
were interrogated individually for several hours. Later that evening, they were made to walk
about 100 metres eastward to another house. They were detained overnight in a room, together
with three others, who identified themselves as residents of Abd Rabbo. They had no access to
food, water or toilets. The next morning, on 9 January, their blindfolds were removed and all
seven were interrogated, individually, by one soldier.
1143. AD/03 stated that the house was being used as a military base and sniper position. On the
second day of detention the Israeli soldiers began to use some detainees as human shields. By
then the detainees had been without food and sleep for a day. They had been subjected to what
AD/03 described as psychological torture. There were constant death threats and insults. To
carry out house searches as human shields the Israeli soldiers took off AD/03’s blindfold but he
remained handcuffed. He was forced to walk in front of the soldiers and told that, if he saw
someone in the house but failed to tell them, he would be killed. He was instructed to search
each room in each house cupboard by cupboard. After one house was completed he was taken to
another house with a gun pressed against his head and told to carry out the same procedure there.
He was punched, slapped and insulted throughout the process.
1144. AD/03 indicated that he was forced to do this twice while the group was being held in
this house for eight days. Others were also required to do the same thing. On the first occasion he
was forced to carry out searches in three houses and on the second in four. AD/03 estimates that
these searches took between one hour and one hour and a half. At no point did he come across
any explosive devices or armed group members.
1145. AD/03 stated that, at the end of every search, the houses were vandalized by the Israeli
soldiers, who broke doors, windows, kitchenware and furniture, for instance.558
1146. At the end of the day he was taken back to the house, where he and six others continued
to be detained for 8 days, until 16 January. They had limited access to food and water and were
often denied access to toilets. They were told that their ordeal would continue indefinitely. One
soldier reportedly told them that the soldiers were “following instructions issued by the chain of
command.”
1147. For the first time the detainees were asked for proof of identity. AD/03 said that their
identification documents were thoroughly inspected. Had they revealed anything in relation to
militant activities, he believed they would have been killed.
1148. On 16 January they were handcuffed, with plastic strips tied very tightly around their
wrists, made to stand in a single file, blindfolded and told to hold on to the shirt of the person
standing in front of them. They were made to walk towards a military tank positioned very close
to the house where they had been detained and told to sit on top of each other inside the tank.
The tank drove on a bumpy track and over big boulders causing them to frequently slam against
the sides of the tank. About three hours later it stopped in an unknown location. On arrival, they
were asked to clamber down into holes or pits about three to four metres deep. AD/03 stated that
they were in a military post, as they heard the voices of several soldiers laughing and joking
noisily. They remained blindfolded and handcuffed and exposed to the continued sound of tank
movement overhead. They remained in the pit for about one hour and were then made to sit
inside a tank that moved in circles.
1149. Shortly afterwards, their handcuffs were removed and they were shackled with chains
inside a bus. They were accompanied by soldiers who spoke Hebrew. On arrival, they were
searched and then interrogated for eight hours before being taken to the military barracks in
Beersheba. Then they were made to line against the wall before being asked to strip naked. They
were made to stand, blindfolded, naked and exposed to the cold winds, for about three or four
hours.
1150. On 19 January, eight people, including AD/03, his brother and one other man from the
group of seven who were taken to Beersheba on 16 January, were shackled inside the bus, made
to bend forward and keep their heads down, between their knees, and were taken to Negev
prison, a journey that lasted approximately four hours. During this journey they were
continuously beaten, kicked and punched by four or five soldiers on board. According to AD/03,
the detainees sustained serious injuries and were bleeding, two bleeding more profusely than the
others. Two detainees reportedly even fainted. He stated that soldiers on board made constant
reference to shackling practices in the Russian Federation, leading AD/03 to believe that the
soldiers were from there.
1151. On arrival at Negev, they were severely beaten by the prison security for approximately
one and a half hours before being put into cells and told that they were caught during battle and
were illegal combatants. Later that night, 10 more people joined the group of detainees.
1152. AD/03 described how on the second day of their incarceration, 20 January, the detainees
(at this point 18 in number) were told that they would be interrogated in accordance with their
alleged political affiliations. Several of them pointed out that they had none. They were grouped
apart. AD/03 said that they talked among themselves and he found out that nine of them were
livestock farmers and three or four were merchants and traders.
1153. AD/03 described how the detainees were divided into two groups of nine each and put in
a section of the prison referred to as the mardaban, which was divided into two wards containing
10 iron beds each and guarded by Israeli Arab soldiers. They remained incarcerated for eight
days, until 27 January, with limited access to food, water, toilets and physical exercise.
1154. On 24 January, AD/03 was given access to a lawyer, affiliated with Addameer, Prisoners
Support and Human Rights Association,559 for the first and only time. The Mission interviewed
him560 and he confirmed that he had visited AD/03 and his brother on 25 January 2009. The
lawyer’s evidence provided corroboration of the detention of AD/03 and his brother (who was
also assisted by the lawyer), and the conditions under which he was subjected to criminal
proceedings in Israel. The lawyer was informed by the Israeli authorities that AD/03 was
detained under the illegal combatant law but he was not given the dossier to review. His brother
was never formally charged.
1155. On 25 January, the detainees were told that they would be taken to Beersheba for their
trial. On 26 January, all 18 detainees were shackled with iron chains to iron benches in a bus,
handcuffed with iron handcuffs and taken to Beersheba. They were not blindfolded. The journey
lasted five hours during which the bus drove on bumpy roads causing the detainees to slam
against the sides of the bus. They were detained in Beersheba overnight in overcrowded cells
together with people convicted of serious offences, according to AD/03. They were mostly
Israeli Jews.
559
1162. The Mission found the witnesses credible and reliable taking into account their
demeanour and the consistency of their statements. At least one of them was still suffering
considerable anguish because of the treatment he had endured at the hands of the Israeli soldiers
and other officials. The Mission notes that there are several common features to these incidents
that disclose a pattern of behaviour on the part of the Israeli soldiers, indicating that the treatment
meted out to the persons deposing before the Mission were not isolated incidents. The facts
available to the Mission indicate that:
• All three locations were near the border with Israel;
• Before the arrival of ground troops, all three had been under aerial or ground attack. The
soldiers on the ground were in complete control of the area at the time of their encounter
with the civilians;
• There was no combat activity by the persons reporting, nor any likelihood of such
activity being under way in the area or nearby at the time that the soldiers started the
operation against civilians in the three locations. None of the civilians was armed or
posed any apparent threat to the soldiers. In two of the incidents they were holding white
flags as a sign of their non-combatant status;
• It is clear in two of the incidents that none of those detained had been asked for their
names by the soldiers for several days. This establishes that there was no definite
suspicion against them that they were combatants or otherwise engaged in hostile
activities;
• In all cases a number of persons were herded together and detained in open spaces for
several hours at a time and exposed to extreme weather conditions;
• The soldiers deliberately subjected civilians, including women and children, to cruel,
inhuman and degrading treatment throughout their ordeal in order to terrorize, intimidate
and humiliate them. The men were made to strip, sometimes naked, at different stages of
their detention. All the men were handcuffed in a most painful manner and blindfolded,
increasing their sense of fear and helplessness;
• Men, women and children were held close to artillery and tank positions, where constant
shelling and firing was taking place, thus not only exposing them to danger, but
increasing their fear and terror. This was deliberate, as is apparent from the fact that the
sandpits to which they were taken were specially prepared and surrounded by barbed
wire;
• During their detention in the Gaza Strip, whether in the open or in houses, the detainees
were subjected to beatings and other physical abuse that amounts to torture. This
continued systematically throughout their detention;
• Civilians were used as human shields by the Israeli armed forces on more than one
occasion in one of the three incidents. Taking account of other incidents in which the
Mission has found this to have happened, it would not be difficult to conclude that this
was a practice repeatedly adopted by the Israeli armed forces during the military
operation in Gaza;
• Many civilians were transferred across the border to Israel and detained in open spaces as
well as in prisons;
• The methods of interrogation amounted not only to torture in some of the cases, but also
to physical and moral coercion of civilians to obtain information;
• These persons were subjected to torture, maltreatment and foul conditions in the prisons.
They were deprived of food and water for several hours at a time and any food they did
receive was inadequate and inedible;
• While in detention in Israel they were denied due process.
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/docs/UNFFMGC_Report.pdf
