Palestinians Dispute Israeli Finding on Prisoner’s Death
By JODI RUDOREN and KHALED ABU AKER
Israeli authorities said the 30-year-old prisoner died of a heart
attack, but Palestinian officials said he was tortured during his
interrogation in an Israeli jail.
By JODI RUDOREN and KHALED ABU AKER
Published: February 24, 2013
JERUSALEM — The Israeli Health Ministry said Sunday night that
preliminary autopsy findings could not determine the cause of death of a
30-year-old Palestinian
prisoner, which Israeli officials had at first attributed to a heart
attack. But Palestinian officials said the lack of heart damage coupled
with bruising on the man’s chest, back and neck suggested that he was
tortured during interrogation.
“The signs that appeared during the autopsy show clearly that he was
subjected to severe torture that led immediately to his death,” Issa
Qaraka, the Palestinian minister of prisoner affairs, said at an evening
news conference in Ramallah, after being briefed by a Palestinian
pathologist who attended the autopsy of the prisoner, Arafat Jaradat,
who died Saturday.
“I hold Israel
fully responsible for killing Arafat Jaradat,” added Mr. Qaraka, who
earlier on Sunday called for an international investigation into the
death. “The Israeli story was forged and full of lies.”
The 4,500 Palestinians in Israeli jails refused meals on Sunday to
protest Mr. Jaradat’s death, and hundreds of Palestinians demonstrated
in several cities and villages in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
After days of such demonstrations, which have included violent clashes
between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers and settlers, Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s special envoy, Isaac Molho, sent a message to the
Palestinian leadership on Sunday that Israeli officials described as an
“unequivocal demand to restore quiet.” Israel also transferred to the
Palestinian Authority $100 million in tax revenue it had been
withholding.
But a senior Israeli official said the government would not accede to
Palestinian requests to release four prisoners who have been on a
long-term hunger strike or 123 people who have been detained since
before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. “Some of these people
are accused of very heinous crimes,” the official said, speaking on the
condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the
matter with the news media. “They’re saying that every Palestinian
hunger striker should have a get-out-of-jail-free card. You can’t have a
system like that. It’s not sustainable.”
After weeks of intensifying protests in solidarity with the hunger
strikers, attention turned Sunday to Mr. Jaradat, who relatives said
worked at a gas station, was the father of a 4-year-old girl and a
2-year-old boy, and came from a family in which all the men had spent
time in Israeli jails. He was arrested last Monday over throwing stones
at Israeli cars near a West Bank settlement during November’s conflict
between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian officials said that Mr. Jaradat admitted the stone-throwing
but denied heaving fire bombs. He also confessed to tossing rocks in a
2006 protest, they said. His detention was extended 12 days at a hearing
on Thursday, during which his lawyer said that Mr. Jaradat complained
of severe pain in his back and neck that he attributed to his
interrogation.
“When he was under interrogation, the interrogator told him, ‘Say
goodbye to your kids,’ ” Mr. Jaradat’s uncle, Musa, said at a news
conference on Sunday morning.
Mr. Qaraka, the prisoner affairs minister, said Sunday night that the
autopsy showed “severe” bruising in multiple areas: the right side of
the chest, the upper right part of the back, upper left shoulder and
along the spine near the bottom of the neck. The pathologist reported no
blood clotting or sign of heart damage, he added, but did see two
broken ribs, an injury inside the lower lip and blood around the
nostrils.
The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, issued a statement
expressing “deep sorrow and shock” over Mr. Jaradat’s death, saying
there was a “need to promptly disclose the true reasons that led to his
martyrdom.”
Few issues resonate more deeply in Palestinian society than the plight
of prisoners: about 800,000 have been detained in Israeli jails since
1967, according to Palestinian leaders; Mr. Jaradat was the 203rd to die
in that time.
Several leaders and commentators warned Sunday that the death, coming
amid a severe financial crisis in the West Bank, could lead to extended
protests, with most predicting a largely nonviolent movement of civil
disobedience like the one Palestinians undertook from 1987 to 1993
rather than the campaign of suicide bombings that began in 2000.
“I know these guys and I see the signs,” Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a
left-leaning member of Israel’s Parliament and a former defense
minister, said on Israel Radio.
Alex Fishman, a columnist, wrote on Sunday in the newspaper Yediot
Aharanot, “The highway leading to an intifada is wide open,” adding that
Mr. Jaradat’s death “is liable to become the opening shot.”
Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian analyst, pointed out that in addition to
mounting outrage over the treatment of prisoners and violence by Israeli
settlers, the Palestinian Authority’s failure to issue paychecks on
time had prompted teachers to call a strike starting Tuesday; health
care workers are already in the middle of a two-week walkout.
Nabil A. Shaath, the Palestinian commissioner for international
relations, said in an interview that the West Bank leadership was “doing
our best to keep calm” and that “violent confrontation absolutely is
not our plan.”
“I don’t know how much people can be contained,” Mr. Shaath said of the
Jaradat case. “I don’t think anybody is planning an intifada. The
question is how much accidents, incidents like this might lead to an
anger that can explode.”
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário