• Torture and inhuman treatment of Palestinian prisoners

Most death penalty sentences imposed on war criminals in World War II were for
crimes of torture and inhuman treatment of prisoners of war and civilian populations under
Axis occupation. The judgement handed down in the high Command Trial regarded as
declaratory of customary law the part of Article 46 of the Geneva Convention that states:
“All forms of corporal punishment, confinement in premises not lighted by daylight and, in
general, all forms of cruelty, whatsoever, are prohibited.” The Zionists are guilty of many of
the same kinds of heinous acts that were committed by the Nazis. While it is true that
Palestinian and Lebanese inmates of Israeli prisons have not been murdered en masse,
nonetheless the detailed evidence that has been gathered on the treatment of Palestinian
prisoners by their Israeli captors reveals shocking parallels between Germany’s treatment
of Jews and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Responsibility does not only rest with those
who actually perpetrate the acts of torture or who establish and administer the prisons
where inhuman conditions exist. Responsibility rests with the entire Zionist structure. In
confirming the death penalty for Japanese General Yamashita, the United States Supreme
Court said that the General had a duty to “take such measures as were within his power
and appropriate in the circumstances to protect prisoners of war and the civilian population,
” that is to say, to prevent offences against them from being committed.
he torture and murder of prisoners generally resulted in the death penalty for those
responsible. The Israeli record of war crimes parallels that of the Axis war criminals. On
July 22, 1980, Palestinian prisoners Ali Shehadeh al Jeferi died at Ramle prison hospital,
where, on July 24, another Palestinian prisoner, Bassam Halawa, also died, it was claimed,
of pneumonia. On July 21 they had been transferred from the notorious Nafha prison.
“In reality, they had been beaten to death, and a probe pushed up their noses had enabled
salt water to be forced into their stomachs,” according to Endpapers Nine.

In the courtyard of a school in Sidon, Lebanese and Norwegian witnesses saw a 60 year old man being beaten up savagely for ten minutes and kicked on all parts of his body,
until he fainted and collapsed. The same witnesses saw Palestinian physician Dr. Nabeel
being dragged by Israeli soldiers with a rope strung around his neck, while other Israeli
soldiers beat him with sticks. Dr. Francis Capet, a French physician, saw three unconscious men lying in the sun, on the earth. Israeli soldiers kicked them in order to awaken them, but in vain. They didn’t move. Dr. Christo Giannou of Canada witnessed four detainees being beaten to death. An Israeli soldier called him to examine the corpses.
Dr. Shafique Islam, a physician from Bangladesh, witnessed an Egyptian who was suffocating and asking for water and air. Israeli soldiers warned him to keep quiet or he would be killed. When he asked again for air and water they simply shot him.

The Bangladeshi doctor further testified: “DR. Nabih Soeb, a Palestinian doctor who graduated in Spain in 1980, had been my neighbor and had worked in the same hospital. IDF soldiers fractured his lower jaw. “Dr. Mohammad Anwar had eleven ribs broken in his right side, and
suffered a cerebral concussion; he had cared for patients with health insurance in Sidon in a wing belonging to the PRCS.

“Rafique Ahmen Tapan, from Bangladesh, was subjected to electric shocks resulting in severe
fractures and an open wound over one wrist.
“A Palestinian boy named Mohammed Ahmad Bakri became insane following torture;
he was refused psychiatric treatment despite several requests through the International
Committee of the Red Cross.”
The Israelis cannot claim any alleged military necessity, either, in their killing of civilian
Palestinians and Lebanese.
Torture and inhuman conditions perpetrated by the Israelis multiplied with the invasion of
Lebanon. But they did not start with the invasion of Lebanon. For example, in 1981 students from Beit Sahour and Bethlehem were tortured by the Zionists:

1. Walid George Qumsieh: Walid, 16, was in very serious condition and was taken to the hospital. He has been savagely beaten and abused by his interrogators who have continued beating him since his arrest on November 15.

Walid had injuries in his back from repeated kicks from the soldiers. The wounds were bleeding and he could not sleep on his back or even sit. He had to spend all his time lying on his abdomen.

Walid was in need of immediate and urgent medical treatment but was denied a doctor by the authorities of the prisons until November 23. The prison authorities gave him two pills after two days of torture and nobody could tell what kind of pills they were.

Walid was forced outdoors during cold rain. Soldiers and guards, two of whom were named Amos and Robert, hit him with their feet and fists whenever they passed him in the courtyard of the prison. He showed his lawyer marks caused by the handcuffs fixed to his hands by his interrogators, mainly by a security man code-named Abu Nidal. The interrogators put a black nylon bag on his head and kept on beating him savagely to force him to confess to “security offenses.”

2. Bassem Abdul Wahed Musa Aslini: Bassem, 17, was brutally beaten and abused by the interrogators who hit him repeatedly on his back causing more inflammation and swelling of his wounds. He asked for a doctor to visit him but the authorities denied him treatment. The constant abuse caused him to faint. Two days after his arrest, a doctor came to visit him and gave him two pills of an unknown kind.

After he was “checked” by the doctor, he was forced to kneel before the interrogators who beat him and abused him severely into confessing to membership in an illegal organization and to writing graffiti on walls against the Israeli occupation. Bassem denied the charges to his lawyer and stressed that he is innocent.

3. Abdul Nasser Abdul Wahed Musa Aslini: Abdul Nasser, Bassem’s brother, 15, was also brutally beaten after he was arrested. He was forced to lay down on the floor of the military vehicle which took him from Beit Sahour to Bethlehem. The soldiers squeezed his hands with hand-cuffs and caused serious injuries. He fell from a height of 12 steps at the Russian Compound while he was subjected to savage torture and interrogation.

4. Amjad Abu Aita: Amjad, 16, was also brutally beaten up by his interrogators and was left outdoors, in cold and under rain for 36 consecutive hours. The beatings were concentrated on his stomach. Ventilation in his cell was so bad that he had trouble breathing. His lawyer saw marks of severe beating on his body. He was forced to confess to throwing a bottle which hit a place 50 meters away from a military vehicle.

5. Ayman Abu Aita: Ayman, 16, was beaten at the site of an operation conducted by Doctor Ahmed Hamzeh Natshe, some time before he was arrested. His condition was also very serious. He was suffering from sever pain in the place of his operation. Under torture he was forced to confess to a two year membership in an illegal organization, that is, when he was 14 years old.

6. Raja Qumsieh: Raja, 17, is the cousin of Walid. He was beaten on various places of his body, but mainly on his genitals. He was left for a long time in the courtyard of the prison, and was forced to confess to membership in an illegal organization since the time he was only 14 years old. His uncle’s house had been demolished before the confession was extracted from him.

7. Tarik Shomali: Tarik is 18 years old. His lawyer said that she had told the soldiers and interrogators that the health of Tarik was at stake, especially because he had only recently left the hospital after several operations and a long convalescence for injuries inflicted on him during his previous arrest. Interrogators tortured him by pushing metal rods into urethra, rupturing it. Despite his delicate condition, soldiers and interrogators beat him severely and left him for two nights outdoors. He was forced to confess to two-year membership in an illegal organization. These seven Palestinian boys were tortured in the same manner as youths  throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. A son of Mr. Soich, the representative of Royal Dutch Shell in Yugoslavia before World War II, was tortured by the Nazis exactly in the same way as these Palestinian boys. He was only in his teenage years. So were they. He was Slavic “Untermensch” to his Nazi tortures. They were Arab Untermensch” to their Zionist torture. Father Edward Dillon, and American Priest of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester, New York, collected evidence from different eyewitnesses regarding Zionist war crimes. He observed: “The racist character of the assault against the Palestinians is betrayed in the Israeli treatment of prisoners. They were held, hands bound, in the stifling heat, without food or water, and subjected to savage beatings.”  Sometimes prisoners were beaten to death, murdered in cold blood. Father Dillon reports: “Dr. Giannou witnessed four prisoners who were beaten to death. He was called upon by an Israeli soldier to examine two of the cadavers. His Norwegian colleague, Dr. Berge, examined another two cadavers and saw five or six piled onto
the ambulance.

“Dr. Giannou saw Israeli officers, including Colonel Amon Amozer, the military governor of Sidon, witnessing these beatings and doing nothing about it. In international law those such as Colonel Amozer who permit murders to take place without trying to prevent them are just as guilty as the culprit who physically beats the victim to death, and command responsibility to prevent war crimes so heinous as torture and murder goes to the very top of the Zionist structure.

Israeli journalist Amnon Dankner quotes a nameless Israeli soldier who witnessed a Zionist military police officer opening fire on defenseless Palestinian prisoners. The nameless soldier “standing outside the fences, watched how the bullets cut into the flesh of those who were hit,” he wrote in the Ha’aretz, the Israeli daily, on November 5, 1982.

This Zionist military police officer is no different from SS officer Fritz Knochlein, who was tried by a British military court in 1948 and sentenced to death for shooting captured British prisoners of the Norfolk Regiment.

The story of Omar
Most of the beating was on his head. They broke all his teeth with the butts of their rifle. They
broke his nose and the blood poured from it. Then they beat him all over his body. His body wassore. It was black from the trapped blood. The beatings left their marks all over his body and he lost sensation. When he lost consciousness they hung him from a pole. They crucified him or four days in the hot sun. They hung him by his wrists with nylon cord, his arms outstretched. The nylon cord cut through his wrists to the bone. All the skin fell off. He could not use his hands. After four days they dumped his body outside the Convent school. He was left for dead. People found him inert and took him to Sha’ab Hospital where he was treated by Dr. Ramsey Sha’ab. Omar was an amnesiac. He could not recall his own name. He could not recognize his family. When he saw me he asked” “Who are you?” When I said I was his sister he asked me to leave. A friend of his who had been released had to tell us what had happened.

We sent Omar to a hospital in Abu Dhabi. There was no tissue on his hands. The bones were
visible and he needed a skin graft. In the first operation they took skin from his arm but the
operation failed and the skin did not take. They had to insert his hands surgically into his thighs to permit new tissue growth to take. He didn’t recover the full use of his hands. He cannot write. The multination of Omar is not an isolated case of Zionist barbarity. Nazi war criminals devised all kinds of tortures for their victims. Lord Russell of Liverpool writes in The Scourge of the Swastica:

A Short History of Nazi War Crimes: “Some were tortured with bars of red-hot iron; their eyes
gouged out, their stomachs ripped open; their feet, hands, fingers, ears and noses hacked off…” Bangladeshi physician Dr. Mohammed Aman al Haq testifies as an eyewitness:
I saw a soldier pulling Dr. Nabih Shuaiby by his shirt and the soldier started beating him. they
tied him to a pole and began to beat him systematically. They beat him with everything. They
used wooden sticks. They used their belts. Blood was coming from his face, from his body. He looked like Jesus Christ, crucified. His head was on his side, bleeding. His hands were tied behind his back. They tied a rope around his neck. They bound him to look up towards the sun. I think he was there for twenty-four hours-- all through the night, too. His whole body became swollen.

I met Dr. Nabih again in Safa. He was beside me. His entire body was still swollen. He could not easily move. His cheek had been punctured-- with a knife. You could see from the outside to the inside. His lip was hanging down to the side. He was cut over his eye.
His wounds were dark. Festering. They needed cleaning and there was nobody to clean
them. The tissue was dead and putrified. Flies continually clustered on him. his life was
in jeopardy. I told you that Dr. Nabih was a very polite man. Although he was suffering much more than us, at that moment he was thinking about others. What would happen to the
Palestinian people? What would happen to men in Safa? Torture was administered to
him, the current so strong that his body leapt from the ground. Mahammed Zaydani lost
consciousness and died. Ibrahim Zaitoun, 30, was also tortured with electricity.

Electrodes were placed on each side of his head. Other wires were attached to mucous
membranes in the mouth, to the testicles and to the join of scrotum and the anus. He is
scarred from these electrode burns. He was also beaten severely and soldiers burned
him with cigarettes, beginning with his wrists, arms and back, ultimately burning him all
over his body.

A feeble–minded Mahmoud al Nabulsi, 22, a Palestinian from the el Akbieh

region, was singled out for torment. He was slowly beaten to death after torture with
electricity. Abu Ali of Rashidiya was attacked by seven soldiers. He was beaten with
sticks to the point where his swollen face forced his eyes shut. Then he was tortured with
electricity. It was administered with a car battery. He was then put in an electrified chair,
his hands and legs tied to the chair so that he could not move.

Treblinka was another infamous Nazi concentration camp where torture and inhuman

treatment were a daily occurrence. When the Nazis left, “there was no lack of physical
evidence on display, the suffocated bodies in recently arrived cattle cars, the abandoned
instruments of torture and death, the files and records that the Germans had so carefully
maintained. At Megiddo, the biblical Armageddon, where the Zionists have created a
camp to rival Treblinka, a Palestinian survivor, Ahmed Ibrahim, testifies:
Three days followed in the broiling sun without food or water. The prisoners were
forced to stand all day and were beaten if they lost their balance or fell. These beatings,
with staves and pipes, took place as prisoners were forced to hold onto long strands of
sharp barbed wire.

Ahmed Ibrahim was struck with a stave with a very thick trunk, four and a half feet
long. He felt that he was dying and would not survive internal bleeding and injury. Two
months later, Ahmed Ibrahim still bore the scars and bruises on his back, which we
photographed, and suffered from chronic chest pain and impaired respiration. The doctor
treating him reported to us that blood was still present in his urine.

The extensive beatings did not conclude Ahmed Ibrahim’s ordeal. When he was
comatose from the beatings, he was brought to an area where electric torture was being
administered to prisoners in a production line. An officer, known as “Lieutenant Ammon,”
about 28 years old, supervised while Sergeant Rafi, 34, turned on the current. The
current which passed through the electrodes was so strong that a man’s body would leap
into the air, screams issuing from the victim, Ahmed Ibrahim was made to lie down on
the ground as electrodes were attached to his ankles, genitals, chest and wrists.

Of the nine people whom Ahmed Ibrahim saw tortured with electricity, some were
electrocuted. Among these was Mohammed Zaydani, who experienced seven shocks
before losing consciousness and dying. Torture unto death was not a random or isolated
occurrence. Ahmed Ibrahim witnessed and heard firsthand accounts from fellow
prisoners who witnessed death-by-torture of sixty-five prisoners in Megiddo. Every
prisoner known by Ahmed Ibrahim in Megiddo had been brutalized and tortured in one
fashion or another. Age provided no protection. Mohammed Moghrabi, in his eighties,
and Hussam, a boy of nine, were among those beaten while forced to keep their hands
on sharply barbed wire. Both were subjected to electric torture. Upon release from
Megiddo prison, Ahmed Ibrahim was placed on a bus together with 60 prisoners. The
degradation and beatings continued en route, even as prisoners had been abused when
first transported to the prisons from which they were now released.

They were made to repeat the chorus first required of them in Zeeb: “All is wonderful
here.” They were all struck with batons. Some had batons jammed in their mouths,
rupturing the throat. Before being released from the bus, Ahmed Ibrahim was warned
that were he to speak of his experience in the detention camps he would be killed.

The Nazis subjected some of their victims, especially Jews and Gypsies, to castration. One
would think that the co-religionists of these Jews would not inflict the same on their victims.
But the Zionists have learned nothing, and repeat everything. Only the names of their
Palestinian victims differ from the names of the Nazis’ victims. Eyewitness testimonies
confirm this:

A Palestinian fisherman, aged 37, had lost an eye, was married and had a son and daughter. The only thing he knows is that they are trying to survive under the ruins of the steps leading to the school. He talked about his cross-examination: “We received blows everywhere, especially between the legs. They gripped our testicles and twisted them and crushed them. This treatment lasted four days. Another time, when I was being interrogated again, a soldier wrung my wrists and hands. He kicked my thighs and genitals. Then they hit my sides with big sticks. I don’t know what they did afterwards because I lost consciousness. When I woke up I was in Haifa hospital. My hand was in a cast and genitals were considerably swollen. I wanted to urinate but could not. The doctor untied me because I was tied to the bed. They put a tube and then the urine came out.“

It was very surprising to obtain these different testimonies on mutilations or tortures applied to
the sexual organs (Arabs usually do not volunteer information on this issue) and I started to mention the problem more frequently and found that this practice was constant, also in the Occupied Territories. A 22-year-old student who left his family in the West Bank and is studying in Damascus and whom I will call Said, told me that in the West Bank, the thing with the cartridge in the penis is a common occurrence.

“During a cross-examination, they undressed me, pulled out the hairs on the pubes, gripped my testicles and twisted them. It was horrible. They did to me the thing with the cartridge in the penis. It’s unbearable. After my liberation I went to see a doctor (this was about 18 months ago) who treated me for months.

I still have pain during erection and I don’t know if I am still fertile. Some of my friends had their testicles smashed. The Red Cross knows all this very well. We have been invited to make a complaint to Geneva. What has been done with these reports? How come you don’t know anything about these reports? It’s a scandal that they are not published. Hundreds of people are in my situation. I beg you to go back to your country and to relate what I have told you. The world has got to know about all that.”

The torture and inhuman treatment by the Israeli often leads to the death of their victims. The Times of London investigated the murder of five Lebanese, one Palestinian and one Egyptian, all prisoners of the Israeli in Lebanon.

Mr. Chehadi, a Syrian who has lived in Sidon since he served with the French Army in the
Second World War, says that he has been interviewed by Israeli military investigators.
Questioned by The Times he said that he arrived at the Muslim cemetery at one o’clock
on the afternoon of June 18 to find Mr. Batrouni waiting for him.

“He told me the Israelis wanted the bodies buried,” Mr. Chehadi said…. “I laid them on
the stone just inside the gate so that I could find their relatives to identify them.”
On the following day, June 11, a Lebanese engineer, who asked The Times not to
publish his name, says that he was driving past the cemetery when a Lebanese police
adjutant, Younis Abrusli, stopped him. Next to Adjutant Abrusli, he says, was an Israeli
military policeman. “ Abrusli said that Chehadi, the cemetery keeper, was not there, so he
wanted me to cut open the gates of the cemetery with my engineering tools.”

The engineer, who has since been interviewed by investigators from the Israeli military
attorney’s office, says that when he arrived at the gates, he was told to help to carry five
bodies from two vehicles, one of them an Israeli car, the other a former Palestinian
ambulance.“ I did not look at them closely,” he says, “…Their hands were tied.”

A week after The Times first asked the engineer’s family for information, three
armed Israelis-- two in plainclothes and one in uniform-- asked to see him. He refused to
disclose what they said to him but was reluctant to discuss the deaths any further.
He did say, however, that a Sidon taxi-driver named Nazih Habbash was also
forced to carry the corpses. Mr. Habbash, who runs a taxi service on the northern side of
Sidon, confirmed this to The Times. He too has been interviewed by the Israeli
investigators.

Adjutant Abrusli has told The Times that an Israeli major tried to cut the nylon
cords tying the hands of the dead men. “The Israeli officer wanted to open the gates of
the cemetery but Chehadi was not there,” he said. “The Israeli asked me to help and I had
to do what I was told. So when I saw a man who was an engineer, I asked him for help.”
Mr. Chehadi says he left the corpses of the seven men at the open entrance to the
cemetery for two days. “They were in civilian clothes,” he says. “All of them had their
hands tied with nylon rope. There were bruises on the necks of two of them. After two
days… in the heat… I had to bury them. I dug beneath and old family vault in the
cemetery and put them there.”

Mr. Chehadi succeeded in finding the relatives of six of the dead. He named them
as: Mohamed Akra, Abudi Abrusli, Yahya Musri, Samir Sabbah, Mohamed Mansou
(all Lebanese) and Mohamed Abu Sikini (Palestinian).

Mr. Chehadi could not discover the name of the seventh man, an Egyptian.
The Israeli Defense Force offices, which were responsible for torturing and murdering these
seven men should be hanged, as their Axis predecessors were for the same type of war
crime. On or about February 28, 1945 Japanese Lieutenant Sadaaki Konishi
“willfully and unlawfully ordered or permitted members of the imperial Japanese Army then
under his command to kill David Gardner, an American citizen his wife, Florence Gardner,
and their infant son, James Gardner, in violation of the laws of war. Lieutenant Konishi was
found guilty of the charges against him and hanged.”

The Zionist war criminals, whatever arrogance they now display in the world, are also
not exempt from obeying the laws of war.

Human endurance can stand only so much. The prisoners of the Nazi war criminals,
Jews and gentiles alike, sometimes revolted against their mistreatment by their captors.

So did the Palestinian prisoners of the Zionist war criminals. In June 1983 Palestinian Arab
inmates of the Zionists’ Al Ansar concentration camp set fire to 220 tents in which they
were miserably housed. In words which could have been said by any Nazi concentration

camp commander, the Zionist camp commander, Col. Moshe Kafri, said that the
Palestinian burned their vermin-infested tents “to gain some publicity and not be forgotten
by the outside.”The resemblance between the Nazi behavior and that of the Israelis
is eerie. German eyewitness Lieutenant Erwin Bingel recounts how Jews were ordered to
assemble by the Nazi barbarians in the town of Uman on September 16, 1941. He says,
“The result of this proclamation was, of course, that all persons concerned appeared as
ordered.” Uman could be the Lebanese village of Hussseinija:

It is Friday, the second of July 1982, 4.30 in the morning. A voice sounds from
megaphones over the streets of the village. “Good morning, dear citizens. Today is a
blessed day. Today is a day of Ramadan.” But then the friendly tone disappears from the
voice, and there comes a ilitary command. “All citizens from 15-75 years of age have
until five o’clock to appear at the village center, Husseinija. Anyone who hides, tries to
flee, or does not appear, will be shot immediately."All entrances to the village were
blocked by Israeli invasion soldiers with the help of native agents who knew every hiding
place, every street crossing. The people slowly streamed out of all the houses. Hundreds
of Israeli soldiers carrying loaded machine guns, along with tanks and armored vehicles,
built a ring around the village center.

In each detail the macabre repetition of behavior is appalling.
Jews complain about the infamous Nazi physician, Dr. Josef Mengele. What about their
own war criminals, the Zionists?

Ill-treatment continued at the places of detention, particularly in Israel, in three
different forms.

First, prisoners were subjected to deliberate brutality by their guards under the
pretext of disciplinary action.

Second, the interrogations were very often, if not systematically, accompanied by
beatings and, on some occasions, by torture. Dr. al-Islam's testimony is particularly
precise on this matter. But in Cyprus the Commission had already heard the evidence of
an American doctor who had tended two victims of brutality in the Gaza hospital in Beirut.

Indeed it has already been shown that some interrogations were only intended as an
excuse for maltreatment.

Third, witnesses are adamant about the inefficiency and, sometimes, the total lack
of medical care given to wounded and sick prisoners in the places of detention. Thus
Dr. Al-Islam states that in Israel a military surgeon refused to allow 17 wounded prisoners
to be treated otherwise than with a piece of soap ("They replied to me that we are going to
give you a piece of soap to clean the wounds once again…that they are terrorists and
don't need any treatment… they come to kill us and let them die in this way… and this
doctor was a surgeon of the Israeli armed forces").

The majority of Zionist officers and soldiers, indoctrinated just as the Nazis had been before
them, never saw any irony in the way they were treating the Palestinians. Rarely, an
occasional Israeli soldier saw the parallel. One of their Palestinian victims confirms this:
The majority of stupid officers caused pain to the prisoners. Other soldiers and officers,
very few of them, were sympathizers. I will never forget that soldier who-- when we, a group
of prisoners, were handcuffed and chained and thrown in the section for interrogation--
looked around and when he saw no officer brought us a piece of corrugated paper and
asked us to sit on it instead of sitting on the cold ground. He said, and I'm quoting his
words, "I hate this place"… and he repeated that many times.

Nazi guards at times couldn't stomach the things they had to do in silence. Once in a
while the truth would come out. This is true of the Zionist war criminals as well. A guard at

Al Ansar testifies:
Someone let the wives and children of the prisoners get close to the fence and there was
some shouting and the "brought ins" approached the fence and the soldiers on the watch
towers were on alert, and someone picked up a stone and threw it at the soldiers, and the
stone was followed by many more, and the soldiers directed their weapons at the crowd
that was moving in the direction of the fence, and someone fired into the air, and a
scream was heard, and the women by the fence cried, and the "brought ins" shouted and
were now running to the fence, pulling at it. And the soldiers didn't know what to do. And
then a military police officer appeared, one of those who are not like us, who sit around
the camp, are always inside the camp, afraid because they know that if anything serious
happens we shall be forced to fire and they will be hurt. So one of the MP officers
appeared, aimed his rifle and began shooting into them, and we, standing outside the
fences, watched how the bullets cut into the flesh of those who were hit, and the wounded
begin to hold on to the wound and the blood streams through their fingers staining the
blue uniform and the wounded fall to the ground crying, and someone seems to be dead,
another is twisting in pain, and their friends bend down next to them, shouting, and there
is more shooting in the air and the loudspeakers call on all the men to get into the tents,
and they obey, leaving the crying wounded on the ground, and it is quiet except for the
wounded, and the military vehicles come to remove them and the smell of gunpowder
mixes for a minute with the permanent stink and then dissolves into the air.

The Nazi torture aimed at removing all human dignity from their victims. Today, the
Zionist tortures do the same. One can compare the testimony of their victims. A Palestinian
survivor of Israeli torture testifies:

Each morning, opening his eyes after a restless sleep, each of us would ask himself, "whose turn is it today?" Meaning, whose turn to go for interrogation today. Then a well-closed caravan would come-- we called it the owl-- that's the name for the van given by the prisoners. It’s a car, a closed car-- a sort of station wagon. Then the officer or the soldier, with a
grim look, would step down with handcuffs in his hands, then he would call a number, then the prisoners would go to the gate, they would handcuff him, blindfold him, throw him into the car, and then he would go to the section for interrogation. We called it the hole. We had names for everything. In the hole he would be thrown there-- not for interrogation actually. They would leave him for hours and sometimes for days, handcuffed and blindfolded.

No food, no cigarettes, sitting in the cold or sitting under the sun, no blankets, nothing of the sort. And then they would bring him back without asking him a single question. This happened to almost everybody. To beat the detainee is a tradition. To insult him is something that should not be questioned. We should be thankful to the Israeli soldier or officer if
he loosens our handcuffs a bit to make it less terminating to wrists or legs.

To insult one's mother or one's sister or one's religion or one's people was a daily thing to do.

One of the things that showed insensitivity is that they take the father and son for interrogation and handcuff both, beat the father in front of his sun or the son in front his father. The worst thing they did, and it really shows their insensitivity, we had very serious medical cases. Someone for example with heart troubles. They would handcuff him, chain him, blindfold him, throw him into the car to take him to hospital. Such a thing would turn a
healthy person into a sick person so it's worse with a sick person to be dealt with in this way. To be beaten, to be thrown in a cell, was so normal we should be thankful we were still alive. And many times they said it. "You should be thankful because you're still alive." As if life means just to breath and eat the crumbs. Life doesn't mean anything if it's not coupled
with dignity-- with human dignity. To them it doesn't mean anything. To them it seems that nobody other than an Israeli is worthy of living. To see a person handcuffed and chained, blindfolded for several days and sometimes several weeks, I don't think that is an act that would be practiced by someone who is sensitive or a normal human being.


The regimen, tortures, and mistreatment inflicted by the Israelis on their Palestinian Arab victims, are the same as those perpetrated by their Nazi war criminal predecessors. This is clearly evidenced in the following account of a Jewish survivor of the Nazi concentration camp of Majdanek: You get up at 3 a.m. you have to dress quickly, and make the "bed" so that
it looks like a matchbox. For the slightest irregularity in bed-making the punishment was 25 lashes, after which it was impossible to lie or sit for a whole month.

Everyone had to leave the barracks immediately. Outside it is still dark-- or else the moon is shinning. People are trembling because of lack of sleep and the cold. In order to warm up a bit, groups of ten to twenty people stand together, back to back so as to rub against one another.

There was what was called a washroom, where everyone in the camp was supposed to wash-- there were only a few faucets-- and we were 4,500 people in that section (no. 3). Of course there was neither soap nor towel or even a handkerchief, so that washing was theoretical rather than practical…

In one day, a person there became a lowly person indeed. At 5 a.m. we used to get half a liter of black, bitter coffee. That was all we got for what was called "breakfast". At 6 a.m.-- a headcount (Appell in German).

We all had to stand at attention, in five, according to the barracks, of which there were 22 in each section. We stood there until the SS men had satisfied their game-playing instincts by "Humorous" orders to take off and put on caps. Then they received their report, and counted us. After the headcount-- work.

We went in groups-- some to build railway tracks or a road, some to the quarries to carry stones or coal, some to take out manure, or for potato-digging, latrine-cleaning, barracks-- or sewer-- repairs. All this took place inside the camp enclosure. During work the SS men beat up the prisoners mercilessly. Inhumanly and for no reason.

They were like wild beasts and, having found their victim, ordered him to present his backside, and beat him with a stick or a whip, usually until the stick broke.

The victims screamed only after the first blows, afterwards he fell unconscious and the SS man then kicked at the ribs, the face, at the most sensitive parts of a man's body, and then, finally convinced that the victim was at the end of his strength, he ordered another Jew to pour one pail of water after the other over the beaten person until he woke and got up.

A favorite sport of the SS was to make a "boxing sack" out of a Jew. This was done in the following way: "Two Jews were stood up, one being forced to hold the other by the collar, and an SS man trained giving him a knock-out.

Of course, after the first blow, the poor victim was likely to fall, and this was prevented by the other Jew holding him up. After the fat, Hitlerite murderer had "trained" in this way for 15 minutes, and only after the poor victim was completely shattered, covered in blood, his teeth knocked out, his nose broken, his eyes hit, they released him and ordered a doctor to treat his wounds. That was their way of taking care and being generous.

Another customary SS habit was to kick a Jew with a heavy boot. The Jew was forced to stand to attention, and all the while the SS man kicked him until he broke some bones. People who stood near enough to such a victim, often heard the breaking of the bones. The pain was so terrible that people,having undergone that treatment, died in agony.

Work was actually unproductive, and its purpose was exhaustion and torture. At 12 noon there was a break for a meal. Standing in line, we received half a liter of soup each. Usually it was cabbage soup, or some other watery liquid, without fats, tasteless. That was lunch. It was eaten-- in all weather-- under the open sky, never in the barracks. No spoons were allowed, though wooden spoons lay on each bunk-- probably for show, for Red Cross

committees. One had to drink the soup out of bowl and lick it like a dog. From 1 p.m. until 6 p.m. there was work again. I must emphasize that if we were lucky we got a 12 o'clock meal. There were "days of punishment"-- when lunch was given together with the evening meal, and it was cold and sour, so that our stomach was empty for a whole day.

Afternoon work was the same: blows, and blows again. Until 6 p.m. At six there was the evening headcount. Again we were forced to stand at attention. Counting, receiving the report. Usually we were left standing at attention for an hour or two, while some prisoners were called up for "punishment parade"-- they were those who in the Germans' eyes had
transgressed in some way during the day, or had not been punctilious in their performance. They were stripped naked publicly, laid out on specially constructed benches, and whipped with 25 or 50 lashes.

The brutal beating and the heart-rending cries-- all this the prisoners had to watch and hear.
Saleh Taamri was a prisoner in the infamous Al Ansar concentration camp established by Israel in occupied Lebanon. The similarities between his account and that of the just -quoted survivor of Nazi -administered Majdanek are obvious; 

A secret Place For Torture

I will talk about the place which is very, very secretive-- it is a top secret place. It has
a code name, Gedera, meaning the wires. In that place you listen to their music coming
from the transistors of the soldiers side by with the shrieks of pain, the head slapping, the
whipping of the prisoners. The rattling of chains reminds you of the dungeons which we
used to see in the films about the medieval ages. That place close to Rehovet on the road
between Ashkelon and Jerusalem is a security prison; some of the cells are no more than
10 feet square. Yes, I was there. That was June until October, yes. Some of the cells are
one meter by one meter. They are painted red inside, bright lights 24 hours a day-- the
normal light of the sun or daylight wouldn't get in. No windows. If you feel like suffocating
because of the lack of fresh air, because of the humidity and the heat, you have to put your
cheek on the floor and squeeze your nose between the edge of the door and the floor,
gasping for fresh air. You can't sleep because you can't stretch your body. You are not
alone in the cell. There is the necessary bucket and the jug-- a dirty plastic jug of water. If
you spill it on the ground-- on the floor, you have to wait sometimes for 12 hours before the
warden brings you water. You can't sleep, you can't stretch your body. You lose your senses
within 44 or 48 hours, and I'm sure some prisoners died there. You would feel that your
heart is bursting. You feel every muscle, every particle of your body in pain.

It is frightening that such a place exists. The rattling of chains would be heard in the
corners of the place. Some of the chains are those that are used for horses. I think the
reason for that is that the place was built by the British mandate-- it was used as a British
police station and in such police stations there would be a stable for horses. The chains are
so heavy they are brutal. I knew many prisoners who spent week after week there in
handcuffs and chains.

Such a place exists and I challenge the Israelis to form a committee to examine what
I say; I am sure that some prisoners died in that center. It is a mini-holocaust led by an
eccentric Israeli officer. His name is Joshua, an Orthodox Jew, a colonel, mentally sick. He
practiced torture himself. Even the wardens, many of them told me, wondered how could
such a human being deal with his children. How can he bring them up healthily in their
minds and souls. But I'm sure not many Israelis know about that place. Even those who
work in the place, some of them are mentally sick. But it is a place where Jewish values are
massacred every minute. Jewish values are being deformed every minute. That place is a
disgrace to humanity, of course there were dogs. There was electricity that could be used--
it was not used with me but I'm sure it was used with others.

There are other prisoners who were in that place, and it's strange enough that
although the Israelis would argue about our condition from the point of the law as
Palestinians, they don't admit that we are war prisoners, so they can justify any bad
behavior towards us. But some Syrian officers and soldiers captured during the war spent
many months in solitary in that damn place. Some Syrian officers lost their minds because
of the isolation, the bad treatment, the demoralization that had been practiced on them all
the time and I challenge the Israelis to say no. Even when the ICRC brought the Syrian
prisoners presents from their families, they were taken away from them after the Read
Cross delivered them and used by the soldiers themselves. They took the Syrian prisoners
to Aclid so the ICRC could see them and give a record or report on where the ICRC met the
Syrian prisoners and when the ICRC left they would bring them back to that mini-holocaust
called Gedera. The Syrian prisoners are prisoners of war but the Israelis' behavior with
them is more than brutal.

One would expect the descendants of those who passed through the holocaust to be
sensitive to human suffering, to care for other humans, but the Israelis are the last to care.
They are not aware of any agony they inflict on other human beings because Jews suffered
that justifies any suffering they cause to others. The Israelis never fail to fabricate moral
justification to hide the most immoral deed.

In Ansar we had thousands of families-- fathers and sons-- and it was systematic
social destruction. I can't look at it except within this context. They brought the father and his
sons, leaving the rest of the family exposed to poverty, worry, and hunger. They knew that.
They want to dismantle the social structure of the Palestinians in the south of Lebanon. We
pointed this out directly and through the ICRC-- they wouldn't listen. We told them, why
should you put in the wires the father and his six sons? Leave one to support the family.
They wouldn't care. They would laugh.

There were doctors, engineers, civilian pilots, teachers, students, workers, all kinds of people with all kinds of jobs and careers in life. Was it necessary? Some of those who
were confined in Ansar were well-known lawyers, Lebanese lawyers. They were not
fighters, they never handled a gun in their lives. If they belonged to political parties, those
parties were licensed by their own government. They were not doing anything against the
law of their country by being members of political parties. They put in Ansar all those who
they imagined did not like the Israelis. People were judged or punished not only for their
beliefs but because of their feelings. I remember a newcomer in Ansar once, late 1983, he
was amazed when they brought him into the section. He was in a sort of hallucination.
"Why did they bring me here, I didn't do anything." The officer, who happened to be a
lawyer, said, "We brought you here to prevent you from thinking of doing anything." He was
a teacher.

They brought in many doctors-- sometimes they would bring a doctor because it was
the only way to provide a doctor without costing the Israeli government a shekel.