Tag: Mohammad Othman

Israel: End arbitrary detention of rights activist

Human Rights Watch

4 December 2009

The Israeli military appeals court should end the administrative detention of Mohammed Othman, a West Bank rights activist, and order his release, Human Rights Watch said today.

Israeli authorities have detained Othman without charge for more than two months on what appear to be politically motivated grounds. On the basis of secret evidence that Othman and his lawyers were not allowed to see, a military court confirmed a military order that consigned Othman to three months administrative detention without charging him with any crime. Othman has no criminal record and, to the knowledge of Human Rights Watch, has never advocated or participated in violence. His detention period, which may be renewed, ends on December 22.

“The only reasonable conclusion is that Othman is being punished for his peaceful advocacy,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The authorities interrogated him for months, then ordered him held some more, but they won’t say why they are holding him and haven’t accused him of any crime.”

Israeli authorities detained Othman, an activist with the “Stop the Wall” campaign, a nonviolent protest movement, on September 22, 2009, as he returned to the West Bank from a trip to Norway, where he spoke about the separation barrier that Israel has constructed in the occupied territory. The barrier was ostensibly built to protect against suicide bombers, but it is not being built along the 1967 border. Instead, 87 percent of the barrier’s route lies inside the West Bank, unlawfully separating residents from their lands, restricting their movement, and effectively annexing occupied lands to unlawful Israeli settlements.

On November 23, after Othman had been detained for 61 days “for the purpose of interrogation,” Colonel Ron Weisel, an Israeli military commander of the West Bank, ordered him held for three months of administrative detention on the grounds that he was a threat to the “security of the area.” The military court of administrative detainees, located in the Israeli military base of Ofer, near Ramallah in the West Bank, upheld the order on November 25 and counted the time that Othman had already been detained toward his detention.

Othman’s administrative detention order came one day after a military court ordered his release. Othman was originally detained under Israeli military orders authorizing “interrogative detention.” According to his lawyers at Addameer, a Palestinian prisoners’ rights organization, on November 22 the Military Court of Appeals ordered Othman’s release on bail on the grounds that no progress had been made in his interrogation, no other evidence against him had been produced, and no charges had been laid against him. However, the court also remanded Othman to detention for 24 hours and allowed the military prosecutor to issue an administrative detention order during that time. Weisel issued Othman’s administrative detention the next day.

Israeli authorities have violated Othman’s rights in detention. Mahmoud Hassan, a lawyer at Addameer who represents Othman, told Human Rights Watch that on November 2 Israeli authorities transferred Othman from the West Bank to a prison in Be’er Sheva, Israel, without informing his family or his lawyers, and barred his lawyers from seeing him for 15 days. “We learned about it only two days later from staff at the Ofer jail, where we tried to visit him,” Hassan said. Othman was not allowed to attend two subsequent hearings on his case, Hassan said, during which time Othman was threatened with administrative detention. Israeli military orders authorize barring outside access to detainees “for the purposes of the interrogation.”

International standards governing the treatment of all persons detained require prompt notification of a detainee’s family, both after the person is detained and after a transfer to another place of detention. In addition, all detainees have the right to be visited by legal counsel, and any restriction on that right can only be in “exceptional circumstances, set out in law.”

The administrative detention order saying that Othman “is a risk to the security of the area,” cites military order 1591 from 2007. Under that order, the military commander of the West Bank may detain an individual for up to six months and renew the detention indefinitely. A military judge must review the commander’s detention order, but the judge does so in a closed hearing, without witnesses, based on secret information that the detainee and his attorney cannot see. The defendant may appeal the military judge’s decision to the military court of appeal for administrative detainees, which is also located in the Ofer military base.

According to Jamal Juma’a, a coordinator for the “Stop the Wall” campaign, an Israeli soldier had detained Othman at a checkpoint during the summer and threatened him because of his advocacy against the wall. Juma’a said that before joining the “Stop the Wall” campaign, Othman worked with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), a World Council of Churches program to accompany Palestinian non-violent activists.

As of November 9, Israel held more than 322 Palestinians in administrative detention, 132 of them for more than a year, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. According to the most recent available official statistics on the cases that actually go to trial in Israeli military courts, obtained by Yesh Din, another Israeli human rights organization, in 2006 Israeli military courts found defendants not guilty in only 23 (or 0.29 percent) of 9,123 trials.

Although international human rights law permits some limited use of administrative detention in emergency situations, the authorities are required to follow basic rules for detention, including a fair hearing at which the detainee can challenge the reasons for his or her detention. As the occupying power in the West Bank, Israel is also bound by the rules governing occupation, which require it to use administrative detention only for imperative reasons of security.

Military violence increases in Jayyous: elderly man arrested during a night invasion

27 November 2009

Israeli Occupation Forces arrested an elderly resident of Jayyous this week, a Palestinian village located in the Qalqilya region, that has maintained an active campaign against the terrorisation of its people and the annexation of its land by the illegal Apartheid Wall.

Mohammad Salim, a 63 year old resident of Jayyous was taken from his home in the middle of the night by Israeli Occupation Forces this week. Salim, an elderly man, was just a few short hours away from leaving for Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to make the holy pilgrimage of the Hajj when he was taken by the military. Residents – even his own family – are dumbfounded as to why he would be targeted.

This is not atypical of the military’s strategy in Jayyous – what appears a haphazard campaign of unpredictable – seemingly random – arrests and violent invasions is a methodical attempt of the army to sow the seeds of internal discontent and provocation within the village.

“They want to create problems inside the community,” says Jayyous activist Abu Azam. “They always give the excuse that people are throwing stones at the Wall, but really they just want to make us fight with each other.”

And the sheer brute force exhibited by the army must surely take its toll. Invasions occur any time during the day or night, accompanied by the sound of sirens, tear gas grenades, sound bombs and bullets – plastic, rubber-coated steel or live ammunition – announcing the arrival of Israeli jeeps inside the village. Curfew was imposed three days consecutively during the last month. Parts of the village now have only 2 days of running water a week after dozens of water tanks were damaged by bullets, while farmers have reported the death of 8 lambs and over 600 chickens from tear gas suffocation.

The danger of military violence is only one of Jayyous’ many problems. Construction of the Apartheid Wall began in Jayyous in 2002, prohibiting access of farmers to 8,600 dunums of their land. Demonstrations began almost immediately, and the Palestinian Land Defense Committee launched a case in the Israeli Supreme Court against the government. They succeeded in a 2006 ruling to re-route the Wall, returning a meager 750 dunums to the village. Almost 8,000 dunums stand on the other side, including 3 water wells. The Israeli government has refused requests for permission of residents of Jayyous to pump the water from these wells to their side of the wall. This affects not only the village itself but the surrounding region, such as the larger town of Azzoun that relies on Jayyous’ small supply of water as well, after the nearby settlement of Qarne Shomron annexed all but two of the towns’ supplying wells.

When it comes to accessing the land, the Israeli government employs bureaucracy itself as a weapon, in the form of a labyrinthine system of permit applications for farmers hoping to reach their fields. Although well over 600 families from Jayyous own farmland on the other side of the wall, only 300 permits farming permits were issued in October for farmers hoping to gain access to their crops for the yearly olive harvest. The permits issued rarely meet the needs of the farmers – such as only one or two family members being permitted access to the land, or access restricted to a few short days, entirely disproportionate to the necessary amount of time to collect crops. The situation is even worse during the rest of the year, as the number of permits issued shrinks to 120, for farmers hoping to plough, prune and work their land. Due to this, thousands of dunums of crops become unharvestable, and agriculture becomes an impossibility for many families.

Jayyous has been a prominent village in Palestinian resistance, as one of the first villages to begin demonstrating against the wall and the continued legal campaign for its removal. The recent imprisonment of Jayyous activist Mohammad Othman has brought the village’s struggle into focus. Othman was arrested at the Jordanian border to the West Bank by Israeli military as he returned from a trip to Norway to promote the BDS campaign. He has now been placed under administrative detention, the detention of an individual by the state without trial – in Othman’s case, for a minimum of three months with the possibility for a renewed term. This clear violation of human rights works in conjunction with Israel’s continued repression of popular resistance such as Jayyous’ fight against the illegal Apartheid Wall and the Israeli occupation.