Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel /Occupied Palestine), 11.02.2025
“The BBC is making misleading comparisons between Hamas terrorists in Israeli prisons and innocent Israeli hostages abducted and held in Gaza, President Isaac Herzog said Sunday.
Speaking on BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, he called for an end to what he described as a “preposterous” narrative that equates Israel’s legal system with Hamas’s brutality.”[i]
Indeed, equating the Palestinians’ freedom fighters with the Israelis who live in the envelope of Gaza that prevents the Palestinians whose families were ethnically cleansed in 1948 from returning to their lands is a “preposterous” narrative by Herzog.
And speaking shamelessly about the Zionist legal system that allows administrative detention for years without a proper trial is even worse.
In administrative detention, a person is held without trial without committing an offense because he or she plans to break the law. As this measure is supposed to be preventive, it has no time limit. The person is detained without legal proceedings by order of the regional military commander based on classified evidence not revealed to them. This leaves the detainees helpless – facing unknown allegations with no way to disprove them, not knowing when they will be released, and without being charged, tried or convicted.
“Israel routinely uses administrative detention and has, over the years, placed thousands of Palestinians behind by bars for periods ranging from several months to several years, without charging them, without telling them what they are accused of, and without disclosing the alleged evidence to them or to their lawyers.
In the West Bank (not including East Jerusalem), administrative detention is carried out under the order regarding Security Provisions. The order empowers the military commander of the West Bank, or another commander to whom the power has been delegated, to place individuals in administrative detention for up to six months at a time if the commander has “reasonable grounds to believe that reasons of regional security or public security require that a certain person be held in detention.” If, before the expiration of the order, the military commander has “reasonable grounds to believe” that the same reasons “still require the retention of the detainee in detention”, he may extend the original order for an additional six-month period “from time to time.” The order regarding Security Provisions places no limit on the overall time a person can be held in administrative detention, so the detention”[ii] can be extended over and over. In practice, this allows Israel to incarcerate Palestinians who have not been convicted of anything for years on end.
The commander may appeal it to the Military Court of Appeals and, thereafter, to the High Court of Justice (HCJ). Hearings on administrative detention orders are held on camera, and the judges can set aside ordinary evidence law. In particular, judges may “accept evidence in the absence of the detainee or their counsel and without disclosing it to them” if they are convinced that disclosing the evidence may “harm regional security or public security”.
According to Human Rights Israel organization Btselem: “At the end of June 2024, the Israel Prison Service (IPS) was holding 3,340 Palestinians in administrative detention. Also, in some cases, the military holds administrative detainees, usually for short periods, until there is room for them in an IPS facility.
At the end of 2020, the IPS adopted a new policy and stopped providing B’Tselem with the requested figures. Instead, it has since published some data on the IPS website every three months. In the first year this occurred (July 2020 through September 2021), the figures published were partial and, therefore, omitted here. The figures from the military were received with a significant time delay and provided no details regarding inmates’ legal standing.
The following figures were provided or published by the military and the IPS, so responsibility for their accuracy lies with them.
Administrative detention of Israeli citizens and residents is carried out under the Emergency Powers (Detentions) Law” [iii]
The emergency power regulations were used by the British Mandate against the Zionist terrorists, and the Zionists said that these laws were worse than the Nazi’s laws.
“Having thus explained and justified its use of violence in general terms, the resistance movement disseminated a third major propaganda theme, which might be called ‘atrocity propaganda’. This theme equated British policies and actions with Nazism and anti-Semitism”.[iv]
The Jewish community in the Land of Israel was very critical of the government’s mandate for its use in defense regulations. In 1946, two young lawyers, Dov Yosef and Yaakov Shimshon Shapira, who later became Ministers of Justice in the independent country, condemned the defense regulations at the Lawyers Association conference The Jews: Shapira stated that “the regulations led to a situation that has no equal in any reformed country. Even in Germany during the Nazi era, there were no such laws” (ibid., 59)[v]
There is no question that the last three Zionist captives who were released were pale and lost weight, and thus reflect the conditions of all the Gazans under the genocide by the Zionist monster. It is disgusting how the Zionists are claiming that the Zionists kept in Gaza suffered a holocaust. If the holocaust was losing weight in time that all the Germans were hungry, there was no genocide of the Jews and the Gypsies. Thus, the Zionists are Holocaust deniers!
It is not by chance that the Zionist mass media did not relate to the condition of the released Palestinian prisoners that some of them hardly walk. The Zionists also tried to prevent any Palestinian celebration for the Palestinian prisoners and raided the houses of the families of the Palestinian prisoners.
Down with the Zionist monster state!
For Palestine, red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[i] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-841308
[ii] https://www.btselem.org/administrative_detention
[iii] https://www.btselem.org/administrative_detention/statistics
[iv] David Anderson Insurgency and counter-Insurgency in Palestine 1945-1947 chapter 7 https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/2934237/254144.pdf
[v] יעל ברדה ניהול “אוכלוסיות מסוכנות”: מפרקטיקות חירום
קולוניאליות לחוקי המאבק בטרור בהודו ובישראל
מרכז וות’רהד למחקרים בין־לאומיים ואזוריים, אוניברסיטת הרוורד
Yael Bards University Harward