Violence among the Palestinians

Humanist, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Erika Waak

   In August [2002], four Palestinians were sentenced to death for allegedly
   helping Israeli agents kill Palestinian militia members. The verdicts were
   passed after a ten-minute hearing. In the same month, a suspected
   collaborator, Suleiman Abu Amra, died during interrogation in a Gaza jail.
   His body reportedly revealed evidence of torture. According to the
   Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, alleged collaborators are
   routinely tortured in Palestinian jails and are denied the right to defend
   themselves in court. This practice is not prohibited under Palestinian law.

Amnesty International and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights informed the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel that six men had been sentenced to death by a firing squad in April 2002 by the State Security Court. This was after having been convinced of collaboration with the Israeli General Security Services according to Amnesty International's April 10, 2002, report on the PA. Himelfarb said:

   Those who are convicted have either been caught helping Israelis, spoken
   out against Arafat, or are involved in rival criminal gangs, and these
   individuals are hung after summary trials. Arafat creates an environment
   where the violence continues while silencing would-be critics, and although
   he could make the violence impossible, he doesn't stop it.

In a letter written on January 2001 Human Rights Watch called on Arafat to immediately suspend all executions and retry those individuals with pending death sentences before courts that meet international fair trial standards. The letter added that Human Rights Watch was disturbed by the PA's repeated recourse to the death penalty in cases in which defendants received grossly unfair trials before state security and military courts whose verdicts may have been influenced by political considerations. Hanny Megally, executive director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch, writes:

   These proceedings had little to do with justice. These men were executed
    after trials lasting only a few hours, where they had no legal counsel or
    right to appeal. The Palestinian Authority has failed to establish the
    rule of law, and these suspicious deaths are the product of that failure.
    People responsible for wrongful deaths should be brought to justice.

Consequences

The suffering of those Palestinian civilians who are arbitrarily detained, jailed, or even murdered by the PA spreads within the community. There are severe economic consequences when a detainee is the family's sole financial provider. Those alleged collaborators who are murdered are even denied burial in Muslim cemeteries. Social ostracism is also a reality for most alleged collaborators and their families. It's usually irrelevant if the alleged collaborator is really guilty or obviously innocent, since the Palestinian society as a whole readily believes the stories conveyed by the PA. This is exceptionally problematic since at least 60 percent of the alleged collaborators killed during the first intifada were innocent.