Israel ‘holding 600 Palestinians’ without charge or trial
Israel is holding about 600 Palestinian detainees without charge or trial, the highest number since 2016, an Israeli rights group has said.
The country says it uses “administrative detention” to thwart attacks and to hold militants without revealing sensitive intelligence.
Palestinians and rights groups say the system is widely abused and denies due process, with some detainees held for months or years without seeing the evidence against them.
HaMoked, an Israeli rights group that regularly gathers figures from prison authorities, said that as of May, 604 people were being held in administrative detention. Nearly all were Palestinian.
Administrative detention is very rarely used against Jews.
HaMoked says 2,441 Palestinians are serving sentences after being convicted in Israeli military courts.
Another 1,478 detainees are being held for questioning, have been charged and are awaiting trial, or are being tried.
Israel has faced a recent wave of attacks and has carried out arrest raids across the occupied West Bank that it says are aimed at preventing more. Those operations have ignited violent protests and gun battles.
At least 29 Palestinians have been killed, according to the
AP. Most died after carrying out attacks or during clashes with Israeli forces, but an unarmed woman and two people who appear to have been bystanders were also killed.
The last time Israel held this many administrative detainees, in October 2016, was also after a surge in violence, including stabbings, shootings and car-ramming attacks carried out by Palestinians. “Administrative detention is used only when the security forces have credible and well-established information of an actual security threat posed by the detainee, and when other avenues to remove the threat are not feasible,” the army said.
Israel says all administrative detention orders are subject to judicial review. Detainees can appeal to a military court of appeals or Israel’s Supreme Court, but rights groups say the courts overwhelmingly defer to the security establishment.
Jessica Montell, the director of HaMoked, said violence did not justify detaining hundreds of people without charge.
“It’s like an assembly line of administrative detention, far in excess of what can be justified under international law,” she said. This permits preventive detention under rare circumstances only and for a limited period of time, she said.
Those held could include militants, but also cases of mistaken identity. A teenager with a rare neuromuscular disorder has been held for over a year.
“We have no idea what they’re suspected of, and many of them also have no idea what actually are the allegations against them, because it’s entirely based on secret evidence,” Ms Montell said.
The West Bank has been under Israeli rule since 1967 and its Palestinian residents are subject to a military justice system.
Thousands of Jewish settlers living among them are subject to Israel’s civilian courts.