WEST BANK (Dispatches) – A Palestinian prisoner was subjected to days-long interrogation 14 times while cuffed by Zionist spy agency Shin Bet. He was also forced into painful stress positions, beaten and deprived of sleep.
However, the Zionist regime’s ministry of judiciary affairs refused to launch a criminal case investigating the torture, which Palestinian prisoner Tarek Bargut described as “cruel, inhuman and humiliating.”
Tarek, a criminal attorney who represented many Palestinians accused of terror attacks and other allegations, was arrested in February 2019, for allegedly shooting at vehicles near Ramallah.
According to a complaint filed against Shin Bet on 29 March 2019, which the Zionist ministry of judiciary affairs ignored, Tarek suffered sleep deprivation and psychological torture, including seeing interrogators arresting his wife and forcing him to watch her being led away in handcuffs.
Tarek added that the Shin Bet interrogator beat him every time he fell asleep and cursed and shouted at him during the interrogation.
Shlomi Abramson, the head of the Investigations Unit for Special Missions in the police service, confirmed that the “the complainant was indeed deprived of sleep during long periods of interrogation.”
According to the details of the report, Tarek was interrogated 14 times in “extended interrogations,” lasting between 27 hours and 47 hours and 55 minutes. Only when Tarek began to accept the accusation against him under pressure, did the interrogations become shorter.
The revelation comes as a prisoners advocacy group says more than one million Palestinians have been detained by the Zionist regime since the ‘Nakba’ in 1948, which marked the loss of the Palestinian homeland.
The director of the Palestinian Center for Prisoners Studies Riad al-Ashqar said the Israel Prison Service (IPS) has been committing brutal crimes against Palestinian prisoners, including women, children, and the elderly.
Palestinian prisoners are subjected to severe physical and psychological torture during the arrest, at interrogation centers, and in jails, he said.
According to the center, nearly 230 Palestinians have been killed as a result of torture and medical negligence in the occupying regime’s jails over the past decades.
The Zionist regime’s jail authorities keep Palestinian prisoners under deplorable conditions lacking proper hygienic standards, the center said. Besides dismal sanitary conditions, the prisoners are subjected to other inhumane and degrading circumstances, including administrative detention, solitary confinement, and bans on family visits.