(CNSNews.com) – Members of a Palestinian family tortured and then hanged a 15-year-old boy accused of “collaborating” with the Israeli authorities, according to Palestinian Authority police who arrested his father, an uncle and a cousin.
P.A. police official Brig.-Gen. Adnan al-Damiri said Thursday that those arrested had confessed to killing Ra’ed Sawalha, and sought to justify their actions by saying he was a “spy” for the Israelis, the Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported.
The boy was found dead on Wednesday in a storeroom basement at the family’s home in a village called Hijjah, near Kalkilya in the P.A.-controlled northern West Bank.
Al-Damiri pledged that the culprits would be punished.
While the incident is particularly shocking because of the victim’s age and the family’s involvement, scores of Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel have been killed by others, including relatives, since the P.A. self-rule administration was established in Gaza and parts of the West Bank in 1994.
Moreover, collaboration is a criminal offense carrying capital punishment in the P.A. legal system. A number of Palestinians found guilty of the charge have been sentenced to death by P.A. military courts.
Researchers say the allegation of collaboration is sometimes used as a convenient pretext for legal complaints in cases of personal or business grievances.
Since 1994, P.A. courts sentenced to death by hanging or firing squad at least 92 Palestinians, 35 of whom were convicted on collaboration charges, according to statistics kept by the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG).
Palestinian law requires that the P.A. president ratify death sentences before executions are carried out. Thirteen have been carried out, mostly on Yasser Arafat’s approval although Mahmoud Abbas, in his first year in office, okayed five executions in mid-2005.
At least eight people on death row were killed in custody instead, while others were murdered while detained in hospital, or were shot dead during purported escape attempts. In 2004 two prisoners sentenced to death for collaborating, Mahmoud Salam al-Sharif and Walid Hamdiy, were killed when hand grenades were thrown into their cell in Gaza City, the al-Quds newspaper reported at the time.
Last April, after a hiatus of several years, a P.A. military court in Hebron sentenced a P.A. security force officer named Imad Saad to death for collaboration, accusing him of having provided information that led Israeli forces to four terrorists. The Oslo peace accords require the P.A. to cooperate with Israel in combating terrorism.
Three months later, a military court in Jenin sentenced another two men to death after convicting them of passing information to Israeli security forces.
Just this week, P.A. court officials in Jenin said a 22-year-old woman, who was not named, had been charged with collaborating, and that prosecutors would seek capital punishment for her.
Meanwhile Hamas, which took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, has also been handing out the death penalty for offenses including collaborating.
Extra-judicial executions are commonplace in Gaza too: dozens of Fatah members accused of collaborating with Israel were killed by Hamas gunmen during Israel’s military offensive launched last December, according to Palestinian rights groups.
Human Rights Watch reported in April that Hamas gunmen in Gaza had killed at least 32 suspected collaborators and tortured more since December.
Torture, unfair trials
Military courts enforcing the PLO’s “revolutionary penal code” account for most the death sentences in the P.A. areas, although civil courts are also empowered to hand down the sentence for specific offenses.
According to the PHRMG, alleged collaborators are routinely tortured in P.A. custody and denied the right to defend themselves in court.
PHRMG executive director Bassam Eid, a veteran human rights monitor, several years ago reported having sat in a security court during a trial of a member of Arafat’s presidential guard, accused of terrorizing Palestinian citizens on the orders of Israeli intelligence.
Fawzi Sawalha and three co-accused had told the court they had confessed under Palestinian police torture, citing “hammer blows to the head, blows to the stomach causing vomiting, and threats to rape their sisters.”
“The judges listened, but did not order an investigation of the claims," Eid told The Jerusalem Post in August 1997.
Sawalha was sentenced to death, although after protests by international human rights groups Arafat later that year commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.
Eid earlier co-authored a report on P.A. police abuses, including violence against suspected collaborators, naming the P.A. preventive security service head Jibril Rajoub as being responsible for abuses. Rajoub in response called Eid “an Israeli agent.”