She describes being put in a cell one meter by one meter where she was able to sit with her arms around her knees and not allowed to sleep. "Every time I started to sleep they came and took me for more questions. They thought if I was tired I would say something about my brother or my friends. I never said anything."
Approximately 10,000 Palestinians are in Israeli prisons. One hundred of them are Palestinian Legislative Council members. Torture is widespread in Israeli prisons, as reported by the Palestinian Prisoner Society, and the prisoners routinely engage in acts of resistance such as hunger strikes in order to bring attention to their suffering. A young woman, Iman, just reaching 30 years old, does not want to remember what happened to her: the sexual abuse, the torture: but she tells for the sake of the others in the prisons. She tells the truth, which many former Palestinian political prisoners are unwilling to do.
"They tied me to a small chair, my hands were cuffed from behind. They peed on a bag and put it on my head. It smelled so bad. It was so dirty. They hit me. They wanted me to talk, but I didn't. And they put dirty water on my head and hot water and my leg and arms." She is heavily scarred on her arms and legs from Israeli interrogators dumping boiling water on her body and putting out their cigarettes on her. "And they caught my hair and swung me around by it. My hair was really long, but now I cut it because if they take me another time, if they arrest me again, I don't want them to have this as my weak point."
The Public Committee against Torture in Israel reports that the illegal exploitation of family members, who, in most instances, are not suspects themselves, has on many occasions caused severe psychological suffering to interrogees and to their innocent relatives. In more extreme cases, this method takes the form of psychological torture of a detainee rendering him a victim of a cruel psychological manipulation via the illegal exploitation of a close relative. In one such case, detailed in the report, the pressure caused by this form of abuse led the detainee to attempt suicide on several occasions.
"I wasn't allowed to go to the bathroom. I am a girl and I needed to go, but I couldn't. Later in the days when they let me there was a soldier with me always, a girl. But it was so dirty I didn't know how to use it. She hit me in the eye when I didn't answer one of her questions. It was swollen. With my friend the soldiers, the men, put their hands all over her body, you know what I mean."
The report "Family Matters, Using Family Members to Pressure Detainees Under Israeli General Security Services Interrogation", written by Attorney Aviel Liner, details a sampling of six cases involving the exploitation of family members. Some of the cases describe a "charade" presented before the detainee showing him that his loved ones are under detention and, like the interrogee, undergoing severe physical torture. In other cases, family members were, in fact, arrested and sometimes tortured, although they were not suspected of any offence whatsoever, all for the purpose of applying pressure on a relative undergoing interrogation. One of the cases outlined in the report concerns a detained couple held for an extended period of time, subjected to severe physical torture, and, in addition, refused knowledge of the fate of their young daughters, aged two and a half and six months old, who were used as bargaining chips by the GSS.
Iman from Deheisha Refugee Camp talks more about her arrest when Israeli forces wanted information about her brother who is now in prison for 21 lifetimes plus 50 years. She was a "bargaining chip."
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