October 24, 2018
| Israel Today Staff
More often than not,
allegations of Israeli abuse take up all the headlines, leaving little room (or
desire) to report on the verifiable abuses being perpetrated against the
Palestinians by their own governments.
And, according to a
scathing report produced by Human Rights Watch, those abuses are
"systematic."
The report labeled
both the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Hamas regime in Gaza as
"police states," and wondered why Western governments that purport to
oppose such things continue to send so much of their taxpayers' money to the
Palestinians.
"Twenty five
years after Oslo, Palestinian authorities have gained only limited power in the
West Bank and Gaza, but yet, where they have autonomy, they have developed
parallel police states," wrote Human Rights Watch deputy director Tom
Porteous, who urged the international community to halt all financial aid
"until the authorities curb those practices and hold those responsible for
abuse accountable."
Among the abuses
Human Rights Watch uncovered after interviewing 147 Palestinians were
"systematic arbitrary arrests and torture" which "violate major
human rights treaties to which Palestine recently acceded" and "may
amount to a crime against humanity prosecutable at the International Criminal
Court."
Individual
Palestinians cited in the report spoke of horrific mistreatment at the hands of
their own police and security forces.
A journalist
arrested in the West Bank for criticizing the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud
Abbas said that police officers tied his hands to the ceiling and "slowly
pulled the rope to apply pressure to his arms, which caused him to feel so much
pain that he had to ask an officer to pull his pants up after he used the
toilet because he could not do it himself."
A civil servant in
Gaza who was arrested for daring to criticize Hamas on Facebook was subjected
to "positional abuse… causing him to feel ‘severe pain in my kidneys and
spine’ and as if his neck would ‘break’ and his ‘body is tearing up
inside."
The report spent a
great deal of time addressing the use of "positional abuse," whereby
both PA and Hamas authorities force detainees into positions that cause
excruciating pain, but leave little or no marks of physical harm.
One might wonder why
the international community, which is in such an uproar over Saudi Arabia's alleged
gruesome handling of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has turned a blind
eye to decades of similar abuse by the Palestinian Authority.
The answer, as some
have suggested, is that the world doesn't really care all that much about the
Palestinian Arabs (as evidenced by the weak response to the slaughter of
thousands of them in Syria's civil war), and only heeds them any attention at
all because their conflict is with the widely despised Jews.