Israeli occupation has turned Palestine into an ‘open-air prison,’ says UN expert

LONDON: The Israeli military occupation has turned Palestine into an “open-air prison” where Palestinians are “constantly confined, surveilled and disciplined,” according to a UN expert.

In a new report for the Human Rights Council, Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Palestine, said that Israel has crushed basic human rights and used mass incarcerations as a means of quashing resistance during its 56-year governance of the Occupied Territories.

The report stated that since 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinians, including children as young as 12, have been arrested and detained under authoritarian rules enacted, enforced and adjudicated by the Israeli military.

Albanese said 5,000 Palestinians, including 160 children, are currently detained and 1,100 are being held without charge or a trial.

Palestinians have been deprived of the basic right of citizens to protection, her report added, and have been arbitrarily detained simply for expressing opinions, attending gatherings, and delivering unauthorized political speeches.

It said that Palestinians are often presumed guilty, even in the absence of evidence, arrested without warrants, detained without charge or trial, and brutalized while in Israeli custody.

“Under Israeli occupation, generations of Palestinians have endured widespread and systematic arbitrary deprivation of liberty, often for the simplest acts of life and the exercise of fundamental human rights,” Albanese said as she presented the report at UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland on Monday.

She said that while she does not condone any violent acts committed by Palestinians during the decades of Israeli occupation, most criminal convictions have resulted from a “litany of violations of international law,” which calls into question the legitimacy of the administration of justice by Israeli authorities.

“Mass incarceration serves the purpose of quelling peaceful opposition against the occupation, protecting the Israeli military and settlers, and ultimately facilitating settler-colonial encroachment,” Albanese said.

“Bundling Palestinians as a collective ‘security threat,’ Israel has used draconian military orders to punish the exercise of basic rights. These measures have been used as tools to subjugate an entire population, depriving them of self-determination, enforcing racial domination and advancing territorial acquisition by force.”

The report documents extensive examples of serious abuses suffered by Palestinian prisoners while in Israeli military custody, including torture, confinement in filthy and overcrowded cells, sleep and food deprivation, medical negligence, severe and prolonged beatings, and other forms of ill treatment.

It states: “The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which has addressed cases of Palestinians since 1992, has repeatedly affirmed that widespread and systematic arbitrary deprivation of liberty may amount to a crime against humanity.”

Albanese accused Israeli authorities of committing gross violations of human rights that amounted to “war crimes,” and called on the International Criminal Court to investigate.

She also urged UN member states to live up to their obligations by refusing to aid or recognize Israel’s occupation and the incremental annexation of Palestinian territory, and to use all “diplomatic, political and economic measures” available under the UN Charter to bring the situation to an end and ensure those responsible for violations are brought to justice.

“The widespread and systematic arbitrariness of the occupation’s carceral regime is yet another expression of the apartheid imposed on the Palestinians, and strengthens the need to end it immediately,” Albanese said.

“The mass and arbitrary deprivation of liberty that Palestinians have been collectively subjected to for decades aims to protect Israel’s annexation of Palestinian territory, a project with unlawful aims pursued by unlawful means.

“This macroscopic violation of fundamental principles of international law cannot be remedied by addressing some of its most brutal consequences. For Israel’s carceral regime to end, and its inherent apartheid with it, its illegal occupation of Palestine must end.”

Albanese said that Israeli authorities will not allow her to travel to the Occupied Territories to conduct her investigations and carry out interviews, despite an invite to do so from the Palestinian Authority.

She said that she has also been subjected to public vilification and intimidation by Israeli officials and pro-Israeli groups worldwide for her work in documenting and reporting on abuses of Palestinian rights under the Israeli occupation but, in a message posted on Twitter, she insisted she remains “unfazed” and “cannot be distracted” by the campaign against her.

She said the Israeli offenses against Palestinians, in particular the building of illegal settlements on Palestinian land, “appear to be part of a plan” to de-Palestinianize the territories. Such a plan threatens the very existence of Palestinians as a people and a national cohesive group, she added.

Special rapporteurs are part of what is known as the special procedures of the UN Human Rights Council. They are independent experts who work on a voluntary basis, are not members of UN staff and are not paid for their work.