[News] Israel subjects UN workers to torture

[Anti-Imperialist News]

electronicintifada.net
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/israel-subjects-un-workers-torture>
Israel subjects UN workers to torture

Maureen Clare Murphy
<https://electronicintifada.net/people/maureen-clare-murphy> Rights and
Accountability
<https://electronicintifada.net/blog/rights-and-accountability> 19 April
2024
------------------------------

A badly damaged UNRWA facility in Gaza City on 10 February.
DPA

Israel is abusing UNRWA employees detained in Gaza in order to extract
forced confessions against the agency, with detainees describing being
subjected to acts of torture.

The forced confessions are likely to be used by Israel in an attempt to
incriminate UNRWA <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/unrwa>, the United
Nations agency for Palestine refugees. Israel is seeking to starve UNRWA
out of existence through smears and unsubstantiated allegations aimed at drying
up the agency’s voluntary funding
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/funding-freeze-could-halt-unrwa-operations-end-month>
.

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the embattled agency, told the UN Security
Council on Wednesday <https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/04/1148676> that
Israel continues to block the provision of life-saving aid as part of its
“insidious campaign” to push UNRWA out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

More than a dozen countries, including top donors US and Germany, froze
funding
<https://www.dw.com/en/after-us-germany-freeze-aid-to-unrwa-could-eu-follow/a-68116182>
or suspended future support for UNRWA after Israel alleged that 12 of its
employees were involved in the 7 October attacks led by Hamas.

The allegations were made public
<https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/official-statements/serious-allegations-against-unrwa-staff-gaza-strip>
by the agency on 26 January – the same day that the UN’s World Court stated
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/world-court-orders-israel-halt-gaza-genocide>
there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza.

Israel has not presented the UN with evidence substantiating its
allegations. Despite this, UNRWA dismissed the employees in question, the
UN secretary-general ordered an investigation and an independent review of
the agency’s adherence to neutrality is expected to make its findings
public in the coming days.

During the Security Council meeting on Wednesday, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s
ambassador to the UN, accused
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/18/unrwa-head-warns-of-insidious-israeli-campaign-to-dismantle-agency>
UNRWA of “creating a sea of Palestinian refugees, millions of them,
indoctrinated to believe that Israel belongs to them.”

UNRWA provides government-like services to 5.9 million registered Palestine
refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The agency is
mandated <https://www.unrwa.org/what-mandate-unrwa-0> by the UN General
Assembly to serve the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were
displaced from their homeland during the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in
1948 and “as a result of the 1967 and subsequent hostilities,” as well as
their descendants.

Palestinian refugees’ right of return is enshrined in UN General Assembly
resolution 194. Israel has denied Palestinians from exercising this right
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/gazas-bell-jar/45816> because doing
so “would alter the demographic character of Israel to the point of
eliminating it as a Jewish state,” as the UN’s Economic and Social
Commission for Western Asia stated in a 2017 report
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/top-israeli-rights-group-breaks-apartheid-taboo>
.
Right of return

Several UN special rapporteurs stated
<https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2023/06/right-return-palestinian-refugees-must-be-prioritised-over-political>
in June 2023, on the occasion of World Refugee Day, that “since 1948, both
the General Assembly and the Security Council have consistently called upon
Israel to facilitate the return of Palestinian refugees and provide
reparations.”

The special rapporteurs affirmed that “the right of return constitutes a
fundamental pillar of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.”

Around two-thirds of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians are
refugees. Nearly every Palestinian in the territory has been displaced from
their home in the past six months and Israel has gunned down
<https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6269/Israel-keeps-up-its-crimes-of-forced-displacement,-threatening-to-kill-those-who-return-home>
people attempting to return to the areas from which they were displaced.

A majority of Gaza’s population is now concentrated in Rafah along the
boundary with Egypt, raising fears of a mass expulsion from the territory.

At least 178 UNRWA employees are among the 34,000 Palestinians killed in
Gaza since 7 October.

Israel has banned UNRWA
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-agency-calls-israel-revoke-ban-food-deliveries-north-gaza-2024-03-26/#:~:text=Israel%20said%20on%20Monday%20it,since%20March%2021%2C%20it%20said.>
from delivering aid to Gaza’s north as children are dying of hunger and
dehydration, in violation of consecutive orders
<https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240328-ord-01-00-en.pdf>
from the International Court of Justice to allow the unimpeded flow of aid.

Lazzarini told the Security Council that “we demand an independent
investigation and accountability for the blatant disregard for the
protected status of humanitarian workers, operations and facilities under
international law.”
Forced confessions

UNRWA staff released from Israeli detention told
<https://www.unrwa.org/sites/default/files/content/resources/summary_on_detention_and_alleged_ill-treatmentupdated.pdf>
their employer that in addition to ill treatment that may amount to
torture, they were “subjected to threats and coercion” and pressure during
interrogations to incriminate the agency.

These “forced confessions against the agency [included] that the agency has
affiliations with Hamas and that UNRWA staff took part in the 7 October
attacks against Israel.”

According to UNRWA, some staff members were “detained during the
performance of their official duties for the UN, including while working at
UNRWA installations and in one case during a coordinated humanitarian
movement.”

Detained UNRWA staff were subjected to a litany of abuses, they say, such
as beatings, including by doctors, attacks by dogs and threats of rape and
electrocution. The agency said that its employees underwent treatment akin
to waterboarding and had guns pointed at them.

UNRWA staff also experienced “verbal and psychological abuse; threats of
murder, injury or harm to family members; humiliating and degrading
treatment; being forced to strip naked and being photographed while they
are undressed; and being forced to hold stress positions.”
“Possibly thousands” detained in Gaza

The agency has collected information from hundreds of Palestinians – men,
women and children – who were detained in Gaza since the beginning of
Israel’s ground operation in late October last year.

Palestinians in Gaza have been detained by Israeli forces while sheltering
in UNRWA facilities under the protection of the UN flag since mid-November.
They have also been detained while attempting to flee south, while working
in hospitals or in the sanctity of their homes.

Overall, “possibly thousands of Palestinian men and boys, and a number of
women and girls,” have been detained in Gaza, the UN human rights office
said in mid-December.

UNRWA says that as of 4 April, it has documented the release of more than
1,500 detainees from Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing point with
Israel, including 43 children and 84 women.

Detainees said they were taken in trucks to various detention centers in
Israel and “held incommunicado in between periods of interrogation,
sometimes for several weeks,” according to UNRWA.

The transfer and detention of detainees outside of occupied territory are
war crimes that violate
<https://www.addameer.org/publications/deportation-policy-palestinian-prisoners-detainees-israeli-detention>
the Fourth Geneva Convention and Rome Statute of the International Criminal
Court.

Israeli authorities subjected Palestinians – “men and women, children,
older persons, persons with disabilities,” according to UNRWA – to ill
treatment throughout their detention.

UNRWA staff observed “signs of trauma and ill treatment” including dog bite
wounds among the released detainees upon their arrival to Kerem Shalom
checkpoint on the Gaza-Israel boundary. Many were transferred to hospitals
in Gaza due to injury or illness.

Released detainees said they were forced to sit on their knees for hours on
end while blindfolded and their hands tied.

They described ill-treatment including “physical beatings, threats of
physical harm, insults and humiliation such as being made to act like
animals or getting urinated on, use of loud music and noise.” Detainees
were also deprived of food, water, sleep and toilets and prevented from
praying.

Tightly locked handcuffs caused “open wounds and friction injuries,”
according to UNRWA, while detainees had their ribs broken and shoulders
dislocated as a result of beating with metal bars, rifle butts and boots.
Sexual violence and threats

Men and boys who were sheltering at an UNRWA installation were forced to
strip naked and remained naked during their detention. Men and women were
subjected to sexual violence and harassment, threats of rape and were
forced to strip in front of soldiers and “photographed and filmed while
naked.”

A 41-year-old man who was detained told UNRWA that detainees were subjected
to electrical shocks through their anuses, causing another man he was
detained with to get sick and die.

A woman who was detained said that an Israeli intelligence officer
displayed her neighborhood on a computer screen and asked them about
individuals residing there. “She said if you don’t confess with all [the]
information, we will bomb your home and kill your family,” the woman told
UNRWA.

The Palestinian Prisoners Club says that Israel “refuses to disclose
information on the number of people from Gaza it has detained over the past
six months, or on where they are being held,” Reuters reported
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-agency-says-staff-other-gaza-detainees-subjected-ill-treatment-2024-04-17/>
.

Al Mezan, a Palestinian human rights group based in Gaza, says
<https://mezan.org/en/post/46418> that Israeli forces have detained at
least 3,000 people in the territory, who are “subjected to multiple forms
of cruelty, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment from the moment they
are arrested.”

Their detention and interrogation “occurs without any judicial oversight or
legal protection, in blatant defiance of international humanitarian law and
international human rights law,” the rights group adds.

Around 1,650 Palestinians from Gaza are being imprisoned by Israel under
its Unlawful Combatants Law in total isolation and denied the right to a
lawyer or legal representation.

“Detainees held under this law are neither granted the status of prisoners
of war under the Third Geneva Convention, nor afforded the protections of
civilian detainees under the Fourth Geneva Convention,” according to Al
Mezan.
Starvation and torture

A lawyer with the rights group recently visited Ashkelon and Ofer prisons,
where some 300 Palestinians from Gaza not held under the Unlawful
Combatants Law are being detained pending investigation.

Al Mezan’s lawyer met with approximately 40 detainees, who provided
“harrowing accounts of torture and inhumane treatment,” including sleep
deprivation and starvation “as a form of torture and collective punishment.”

A 19-year-old told the rights group that three of his fingernails were
removed during interrogation, that a dog was unleashed on him and he was
placed in a stress position for prolonged periods during three days of
interrogation.

Al Mezan’s lawyer “reported that all detainees suffer from acute
emaciation, fatigue and back curvature due to being forced to bend their
backs and heads while walking.” Many were unable to “recall the names of
people present in the room” due to the physical and psychological abuse,
the rights group said.

According to Al Mezan’s lawyer, “in his more than 20 years of working with
detainees, he had never encountered conditions as appalling as those
observed at Ofer prison.”

The rights group said that the serious harm caused to Palestinians from
Gaza in Israeli detention situates it “within the legal framework of the
crime of genocide.”

Al Mezan added that Israel’s use of “systematic and widespread torture”
constitute crimes against humanity and called on the chief prosecutor of
the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants.
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