Ha'aretz,
An Israeli Newspaper Atlast Publishes the Criminal
Military Tortures of the Israeli Defense Force
Now you Are
Paralyzed As We Promised
By Gideon Levy
"We have to make
you do a little sports," the Shin Bet
interrogator said, launching four successive days
of questioning accompanied by brutal physical
torture. The result: Luwaii Ashqar can no longer
stand on his feet. He sits in his wheelchair,
dressed in a fashionable quasi-military suit,
super-elegant, new Caterpillar-brand shoes on his
paralyzed feet.
"I love this color," he says about his
uniform. "It's the color of the soldiers who
came to arrest me for the interrogation that did
all this to me."
His smile is captivating, his Hebrew rich and
incisive. He is a young man whose world fell
apart. He entered prison sound of body and mind
and emerged a broken man. For four days and four
nights nonstop, he says, he was interrogated and
subjected to torture of the most brutal kind. The
result is the person we see before us in the
wheelchair, in the elegant home high in the
village of Saida, north of Tul Karm, which was
placed at his disposal by a friend after he was
released from Israeli prison a month ago.Was
there a judgment by the High Court of Justice?
There was. It banned precisely the types of
torture he underwent: the "banana
posture," the "shabah" (body
stretching with hands tied to a chair),
"invisible" blows and the "frog
posture" (being forced to stand for hours on
the toes in a crouching position) - all the way
to a vicious kick to his chest that bent his body
backward while he was tied to a chair with his
arms and legs, and which was the probable cause
of the partial paralysis of his legs.
Throwing up with the vomit entering his nostrils,
losing consciousness and being given only
saltwater to drink, relieving himself in his
pants, not sleeping or resting - all of that for
four consecutive days and nights.
What does the interrogator Maimon tell his
children when he goes home? What do Eldad and
Sagiv tell their wives about their daily labors
before they turn in? That they tortured another
helpless prisoner until they turned him into a
cripple? That they beat this charming young man
brutally and that at the end of the interrogation
he was tried for only marginal offenses? And
where is the Supreme Court, which in 1999
prohibited precisely the chain of torture that
Luwaii Sati Ashqar, 30, who was married three
years ago, underwent in the Kishon detention
facility?
Ashqar is not alone. The Public Committee Against
Torture in Israel has just issued a new report
containing the testimonies of nine torture
victims (English version:
www.stoptorture.org.il//eng). As the authors of
the shocking report say, the testimonies
"paint a dismal picture in which can be
discerned various categories of secret-keeping
collaborators, who, in keeping silent, protect
the [Shin Bet] system of torture." ...
On the wall is a picture, a fine drawing of a
kneeling prisoner, his head between his knees.
The caption: "I am in the darkness of the
prison, living on your memory. I am far from you,
lying in my bed, my spirit cruising your land all
night. God will release all the prisoners, the
strong will triumph."
Ashqar is sitting in his wheelchair, his left leg
completely enclosed in a cast, his right leg
shaking nonstop. When he tries to get up and lean
on his crutches, he threatens to topple over.
"I was married in 2004, and I started to
work in aluminum in the village to provide for my
new household. On April 22, 2005, at 2:30 A.M.,
the soldiers came and started to throw grenades
and to shout for everyone in the house to go
outside. They blindfolded me with whatever they
use and handcuffed me. I was taken in a jeep to
prison and I was examined by an army doctor. He
looked over my body - no operations, doesn't take
medication, no illnesses. Again I was taken in a
military jeep, this time to Kishon. 'Yehuda,
incoming,' the warder said and transferred me to
the interrogation office. They opened my eyes:
Good morning. An excellent morning. One of the
interrogators, Maimon, told me: I am responsible
for your file. What file? The one you were
arrested for. This is the major, and this tall
guy is the colonel, this is Sagiv and this is
Eldad. Eight interrogators.
"They said: We have no time, it will soon be
our Passover and you have to finish everything in
a short time. Finish what? You have to tell us
what you have. I don't have anything to tell you.
I begged. They said: We know all that nonsense.
We are talking about security. Plans for
terrorist attacks at Passover. I said: I don't
understand what you are talking about. They said:
The suicide bomber was at your place. What
suicide bomber?
"After two hours of talking they said to me:
If you don't give everything you have, we will
have to take it by a different way. What is the
different way? Did you hear of a military
interrogation? You might leave here with your
body battered or crippled. I was taken to a
military interrogation. Here you pray to God that
you will die, they said, but we won't give you
that. We will let you die only after you spill
out what we are looking for. He gave me a prison
uniform and I told him that if I was going to
die, I preferred my own clothes.
"They sat me down on a square chair without
a back, which was attached to the floor and had
sharp metal ends [sticking up]. My legs were tied
to the legs of the chair with metal cuffs and my
hands were tied behind my back with metal cuffs.
One interrogator sat behind me and the other in
front of me. The interrogator opposite me said:
We have to give you a little sports, so you will
be able to hold out in the military
interrogation. The sports was that they pushed me
backward by the chest, a backward somersault, and
I would hold myself so my bones would not break.
After a minute or two I would automatically fall
on the floor, but the interrogator behind me
would put his foot on my chest and press, and the
interrogator in front would grab my hands and
pull and pull behind the chair. They kept on like
that until I don't know what happened to me, heat
in every part of my body, puking everything I had
in my stomach and it would go into my nostrils. I
would wake up when they poured water on my face.
When I woke up, we went back to the same
situation. It went on like this 15-20 times an
hour.
"After that they made me crouch on my toes,
not letting me lean on the back of my foot. I was
in that position for 40-50 minutes, maybe an hour
- that was my estimate - until I felt my soles
swelling and they turned blue and there was
tremendous pain. After that, stand up, and they
tied my hands and pressed as hard as they could
on the metal handcuffs until the metal dug into
my hand. Here are the signs, you can still see
them. Because of the pressure, the key of the
handcuffs didn't always work and they would bring
huge metal scissors, like they use in
construction, and tear off the handcuffs and then
bring new ones, to go on. The color of my hands
changed to blue, and when they opened [the
handcuffs] my hands shook. The interrogator stood
on the table and pulled me with a chain of
handcuffs. When I fell, they pulled me by the
hair.
"I would cry, beg, shout, and they came back
to me with words, that it was impossible to stop,
only after you start talking about what we want.
I said to them: Tell me what you want. Tell me I
am responsible for the attack on the Pentagon, I
am ready to confess to everything, just tell me
what. I want to end this death."
"There were always four interrogators and
two rotated every four hours, day and night. The
new ones would tell me they were stronger than
the ones before, that the ones before were a
joke, we are the strong ones. And that was true.
The new ones tied me and started to beat me all
over my body. One interrogator pressed hard on my
testicles and on my feet with his shoes. When
they slapped me and I tried to pull back, the
major would say: What are you doing? If you move
back, I will break your nose, and if you move
forward I will rip off your ear. Be strong and
take it sportingly, because you are a soldier and
a fighter. They broke this tooth."
Ashqar suddenly stops talking. He turns pale and
his face is covered with beads of perspiration.
His father, Sati, quickly wipes his face with a
damp cloth. "Every time I try to remember I
get dizzy, even when I am alone." Quiet
descends in the room. It will take Ashqar another
few minutes to pull himself together.
"I was taken into detention on Friday
morning, and that was the last light of day I saw
before the interrogation. I came out for the
first time on Monday night or before dawn on
Tuesday morning. On those long days I sat in a
chair and did not even go to the toilet. So you
won't kill yourself, they said. I urinated in my
clothes, and a terrible stench started. For four
days I didn't eat anything. They told me: If we
give you something to eat, something will happen
to your stomach and your intestines. Maybe they
will explode under the pressure of the food when
we push you backward. You will drink only half a
cup of saltwater. That is what they gave me every
time after they bent me and I vomited. Why with
salt? I asked. Give me without salt. No, so
nothing will happen in your stomach and
intestines. I would drink it and vomit.
"On Monday evening, they told me that five
witnesses had testified that Luwaii had
transported a wanted man. I told them that there
was a famous wanted man named Luwaii Sadi, but my
name is Luwaii Sati, and maybe they had mixed us
up. He said to me: Are you saying the Shin Bet is
that stupid? We know exactly what we're doing,
and it is all correct. I said: Put me on trial
for whatever you want. He said: Ya'allah, sports
again. He pushes me backward in the chair. I will
help you become a story in Palestinian history.
He is talking to me and my head is down below. He
pushes strongly with his leg and presses on my
chest. I felt something like an explosion in my
body. Like something broke. After that I don't
know what happened. I woke up and they were
pouring water on my face. Again they pushed me
backward and again I fainted.
"He said to me: Stand on your feet. I felt
that my legs were cold, like pins and needles in
the legs. I said: I can't. He said: Now you are
paralyzed. I said: I guess I am. He said: That is
what we promised you and that is what you
want."
"I discovered I had a wound in the back and
it was bleeding - because of the sharp chair -
and one of my bones was protruding. Because of
the blood and because of the urine of four days
there was such a stench that the interrogator
could not come close to me. He said: Why do you
stink like that? I told him: That is your
perfume. A warder took me to the shower and threw
me on the floor and said to me: Ya'allah, you
have two minutes to shower. I looked at the
faucet up above and I could not reach it. I
pulled down my pants and the underpants stayed in
place. I tried to pull them down - I could do it
in front but behind it was stuck to my back. The
two minutes went by and the warder started to
pound on the door. Time's up. I told him: Give me
another two minutes, I can't reach the faucet. He
came in and asked: What do you have on your back?
I said: I don't know.
"He called the interrogator and said: Come
and see the prisoner. The interrogator came and
asked: What do you have, Luwaii? I said: I don't
know what I have on my back, I can't pull the
underpants down and I can't reach the faucet. He
said: Ya'allah, we will go up and finish the
story and take you to the doctor.
"Two warders took me in a Prisons Service
vehicle to Rambam [Medical Center in Haifa]. In
emergency, my hands and feet were tied and a
Russian doctor asked me: What hurts you? I told
him: My whole body hurts from the interrogation.
The Druze warder said: Shut up. The doctor turned
me on the side and stuck a finger into my ass. I
asked him: What are you doing? He said: I am
checking whether you have hemorrhoids. Why didn't
you ask me first? I am a professional, he said. I
said: What about the wound on the back? He put
ointment there and dressed it. After 10 minutes I
was taken back to interrogation. Again I was tied
to the square chair. The bandage fell off and the
wound started to bleed again. After that, they
stopped the military interrogation."
He was interrogated for another two months, but
without physical torture. He was told that his
wife had been arrested because of him - a
complete fabrication - and he was given a lie
detector test ("the falsehoods
machine," in his Hebrew). For two weeks he
was placed in a cell with stool pigeons. In the
end, he was indicted on only two counts, in
Prosecution File 2157/05: assisting a wanted
person to hide and using a forged document. No
ticking and no bomb. Ashqar was sentenced to 26
months in prison and was released a month ago. In
the meantime, his younger brother, Osaimar,
disappeared. Soldiers came to the house looking
for him, but he was not there. His family has not
seen him since: He told them that he was not
willing to undergo what Luwaii did.
Luwaii is now looking for a way to get medical
treatment in Israel or abroad, after his
physician told him that he would not be able to
get rehabilitation in the West Bank. His lawyer
told him that the Shin Bet will almost certainly
prevent him from going anywhere.
This is the response received by Haaretz from the
Shin Bet:
Luwaii Ashqar was arrested in April 2005, after
serious suspicions were raised against him
concerning his involvement in terrorism,
including possession of weapons and assistance to
wanted individuals - terror activists from
Islamic Jihad.
One of the suspicions was that he had provided
accommodation, ahead of a terrorist act, for
Sirhan Sarhan, the perpetrator of the attack in
Kibbutz Metzer, who murdered Revital Ohayon and
her two children, Noam and Matan, of blessed
memory.
The suspect was tried and convicted in a plea
bargain, and sentenced to 14 months in prison and
another 14 months in prison stemming from a
pending conditional sentence, so that all told he
was sentenced to 26 months in prison. In
addition, he received a 28-month suspended
sentence.
His interrogation was carried out according to
the rules and directives, with constant review of
the interrogation process.
During the interrogation, the above-named put
forward medical complaints, which were examined
and treated by the appropriate medical
authorities, including an examination he
underwent in hospital.
It should be noted that during the interrogation
he did not cite medical complaints of the same
seriousness as those mentioned in the query.
Complaints relating to his interrogation, from,
among other sources, the Committee Against
Torture and the Red Cross, were referred to the
State Prosecutor's Office for examination, which
ordered an examination by the Ombudsman of
Interogees' Complaints.
The examination of the complaints did not turn up
any excesses in the interrogation, and in the
wake of this, the official in charge of the OIC
in the State Prosecutor's Office decided to close
the examination file.
road to NablusAnd
now, they kill a fetus
By Gideon Levy
05/21/07 "Haaretz"
-- -- - Memorial posters decorate the
walls of the Rafidiya government hospital
in Nablus, covering earlier posters of
countless young people who have been
killed. But this poster is like nothing
we have seen before: a fetus covered in
its own blood, its tiny head blown up by
the bullet that struck its mother, and
the caption - "Who gave you the
right to steal his life?"
The killing of the unborn child, Daoud,
by Israel Defense Forces troops raises a
series of moral, legal and philosophical
questions. Is the killing of a fetus
manslaughter? Is it murder? And how old
is the victim? But all these questions
are dwarfed by the woman lying stunned
and injured in the maternity ward of the
hospital in Nablus, in agony, with all
kinds of tubes attached to her, refusing
to answer a single question.
It is obvious that Maha Katouni is still
in a state of trauma. Wounded in the
abdomen, she lies in bed, her elderly
mother by her side. The tube in her nose
makes it hard for her to speak. She is 30
years old and was in the seventh month of
pregnancy, a mother who got up in the
middle of the night to protect her three
small children, sleeping in the other
room, from the bullets that were
whistling by outside. As soon as she got
out of bed, the bullet struck her.
Bleeding, she fell on the nightstand by
her bed. Maha survived, but Daoud - as
she and her husband planned to name their
son - was removed from her womb with a
bullet wound to the head.??"And
babies?" a reporter once asked an
American soldier who had taken part in
the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War.
His succinct answer was just as chilling
as the question. "Babies." And
now, a fetus.?
The day before, I had been in Soweto,
near Johannesburg, South Africa,
accompanied by the Palestinian ambassador
to the UN, Riyad Mansour, comparing the
horrors of apartheid to the Israeli
occupation in the territories. The next
afternoon I was here, in the Rafidiya
maternity ward, standing before the bed
of the wounded Maha, who had lost her
baby.
The biggest hospital in the territories
is practically deserted, barely
functioning. It has been this way for two
months now. Like the other hospitals in
the West Bank, Rafidiya accepts only
emergency cases, because of the economic
boycott of the Palestinian Authority,
which also prevents the workers here from
being paid. Only 20 of the hospital's 168
beds are currently occupied, and only
about a third of the hospital's 380 staff
members show up for work. In the
emergency room we saw just one patient,
who had arrived that morning. The rest of
the beds were empty. In the past two and
a half months, the workers have received
just NIS 1,500 per person, from funds
provided by the European Union.
Hospital director Dr. Khaled Salah says
that the staff and patients don't come to
the hospital because of the difficulties
in getting to Nablus and the cost of the
trip, which has risen significantly
because of the checkpoints. The Hawara
checkpoint and the Beit Iba checkpoint,
the two checkpoints on the city's
outskirts, are relatively deserted,
because of the difficulty in getting past
them.
Maha lies in bed, her eyes closed. A
green headscarf covers her head. Her skin
is ashen. Every once in a while she opens
her eyes but then quickly closes them
again. Once in a while she also murmurs a
few words in a feeble voice and then goes
quiet again. How are you? Silence. Maha
is a resident of the Ein Beit Ilma
refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus.
She is married to Rifat, a 36-year-old
school janitor, and the couple have three
children: Jihad, 10; Jawad, 7; and Jad,
3. Two uncles and her mother watch over
her, not budging from her bedside. For
the father of the family, it's too hard
to be here. He's still in shock.
Last Wednesday was an ordinary day in the
Katouni household. The father went to
work, the kids went to school, and in the
evening everyone went to bed - the
parents in their bedroom and the three
children in their room in the third-floor
apartment. Shortly after two in the
morning, Maha was startled awake by the
loud sounds of gunfire from the street.
She didn't even manage to turn on the
light when she got up to run to the kids'
room next door, to reassure her three
little boys and keep them from getting
scared. The gunfire was very heavy. The
window of her room was open and her bed
was close to the window.
Maha got out of bed, took one step, and
then the bullet struck her in the lower
back. She fell onto the nightstand.
Another bullet struck the nightstand.
Soldiers from the Nahal patrol battalion
were standing on the roofs of the
surrounding buildings. "Wherever we
are sent - to there we go," the poet
Yaakov Orland once wrote in "The
Nahal Anthem," sung by the Nahal
entertainment troupe, which also sang
"The Song of Peace."
Rifat rushed to call an ambulance. The
children, who had awakened, were
hysterical, especially the youngest,
3-year-old Jad, at the sight of the blood
trickling from the front and back of
their pregnant mother, who lay wounded on
the floor. The bullet had struck her from
behind, passed through the fetus' head
and the mother's intestines and exited
through the abdomen.
Family members say that about 45 minutes
went by before the ambulance from the
Medical Relief organization was permitted
to approach. In the meantime, Maha's
mother, Umm Ibrahim, tried to leave her
home nearby to come to her daughter's
aid. Umm Ibrahim says that when she tried
to leave her house there was gunfire; she
hurried back inside. "It's a miracle
that I was saved," says the woman in
the white headscarf. She could not reach
her injured daughter and would not see
her until two hours later, in the
hospital.
The pain is written all over Maha's face.
One of her brothers somehow managed to
cross the line of fire and get to her
house; he tried to stanch the gaping
wound in her stomach with a towel. Her
husband, Rifat, was paralyzed with shock.
Umm Ibrahim says that her son, who tended
to Maha, could see through the hole in
her abdomen that the fetus had been
wounded in the head and was dead.
The gunfire finally subsided at around
three in the morning and they were able
to take Maha out to the street, carried
by her brother and the paramedic from the
ambulance that had parked in the nearby
alley. The brother says that on the way
to the hospital they were stopped twice
by soldiers, who wanted to check the
wounded woman's identity and to make sure
there were no wanted men hiding in the
ambulance. Maha was barely conscious when
she reached the hospital, but her mother
says she understood right away that she
had lost the baby.
The family says the IDF enters the camp
nearly every night and that there is
almost always gunfire. Umm Ibrahim
managed to get to the hospital at four in
the morning, when her daughter was in the
operating room and the dead fetus had
already been removed.
Dr. Ihab Shareideh was the surgeon who
was summoned to the hospital in the
middle of the night to operate on Maha.
He says that her recovery has been more
difficult and slower than usual, not only
because of her injuries, but because of
her traumatized mental state.
Fortunately, not many blood vessels were
injured, so the delay in getting her to
the hospital did not cause further
damage. It is too soon to gauge the
extent of the damage to her digestive
system, or to say whether she will be
able to get pregnant again. The fetus
died as a result of the bullet that
penetrated its brain on the way to the
mother's intestines.
The anesthesiologist, Dr. Iyad Salim, a
resident of nearby Hawara, roams the
hospital corridors. On his cell phone
camera is a video of the operation and
the removal of the fetus. So close to
being a fully developed baby, with a
bullet wound to the head. The memorial
poster shows the etus bleeding from the
head. The image is unbearable.
They were going to call him Daoud, after
an uncle, and also after a resident of
the camp who was killed. At home they had
everything ready: new clothes, diapers
and a crib passed down from his older
brothers. Daoud was buried in the camp
cemetery. Only a few close family members
attended the funeral of the unborn baby.
At press time, no response had been
received from the IDF Spokesperson's
Office.
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