Tag: Shin Bet

Israeli Court orders Gaza Power Plant's Abu Sisi to stay in jail seven more days

Haarez’s Yossi Melman reported tonight that a Petah Tikvah court judge has ordered that Gaza Power Plant’s Deputy Director of Operations, Dirar Abu Sisi, to remain in jail another seven days (at least) — at the request of the Israeli General Security Service (Shin Bet – responsible for intelligence about internal security in Israel) and the Israeli Police.

Melman wrote that “The extension of Abu Sisi’s remand was made possible after Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein granted the security service special permission to issue the request. Weinstein’s permission is necessary in any case of a request to extend the remand beyond 30 days”.

Melman added: “At the request of the Shin Bet security service and the State Prosecutor’s Office, a comprehensive gag order was issued at the time of Abu Sisi’s arrest, around a month ago. About 10 days ago the order was modified to permit the publication in Israel of details already reported in the foreign media”. Melman’s report in Haaretz can be read in full here.

The gag order was modified by the Petah Tikvah court in response to a petition from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).

Abu Sisi was in Ukraine since 18 January in connection with his application for citizenship, filed by his wife, a Ukranian citizen. A month later, he was grabbed while on a train to Kiev, and flown to Israel by men he said identified themselves as agents of Mossad, Israel’s external spy service, He told an Israeli lawyer representing the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) that he was denied access to a lawyer for his first 14 days in Israel, and then for another 11 days.

No charges have yet been filed against Abu Sisi.

UPDATE: Richard Silverstein, who broke the story about Abu Sisi’s kidnapping/extradition from Ukraine to Israel, wrote here that Abu Sisi’s attorney, Smardar Ben Natan, told him that “The state came today with a request to extend the detention in additional 8 days, this was supported by an approval of the senior state attorney, Shay Nitzan, and with the explanation that the prosecution went through the evidence material and asked for 8 additional actions in order to complete the investigation. We argued that if the state does not have enough evidence after 34 days of interrogation, where they should have had evidence to justify the outrageous arrest even before [it occurred], Derar should be released and returned to Ukraine. They were trying to justify the arrest by making him confess [to their] accusations. The court allowed the detention until next Thursday. Derar looked very tired and complained that he can’t stand it anymore and that they are just repeating the same questions over and over again, and trying to break him”.

Silverstein himself asks: “So let’s say Dirar is the worst you can conceive. If you want to kidnap him and render him to Israel wouldn’t you have a case against him before doing so? In what kind of legal system do you arrest someone before having such a case built, and then attempt to figure out what to charge him with based on what he tells you during interrogation? And let’s say he tells you something new you didn’t know during interrogation. Surely, you can file a basic charge and then amplify it with what you learn later. The fact that they have refused to file any charge at all is outrageous. The fact that they come and demand an extension is equally outrageous”.

In a later post, here, Silverstein adds: “It’s unusual in the Israeli legal system for a security suspect to be held longer than 30 days without filing charges. They’ve had Abusisi for 34 days. After that amount of time they still have eight areas in which the top government lawyer says he needs better evidence to prosecute. What’s wrong with this picture? The attorney general has also told Shabak that there is a wide gap between the claims levelled against the kidnapped Gaza engineer and the evidence he’s seen. This does not sound like a happy prosecutor”.

UPDATE: Ben Natan, the attorney for Abu Sisi, told CNN that “I hope that he will be released after these eight days. I expect that after these days, the prosecution might present an indictment. We plan to argue against the future indictment saying that the circumstances of this person’s arrest give him the defense of abusive process,” his lawyer added.

She also told CNN that Abu Sisi “is very exhausted after what he has been through. He sees the interrogation as meant to break his spirit and make him confess things that he did not commit. He was not part of Hamas leadership. He was holding a civil position in the power plant of the Gaza strip and this interrogation is trying to portray him as something that he is not”.

The CNN report, published here, added that “just why the Palestinian engineer was being held and what charges the Israeli government intends to bring against him remain unclear. So far, not even his lawyers have been granted access to the results of his interrogation, they say. ‘We know about the suspicions only generally. The material from the interrogation is still not being disclosed to us and there is a gag order over that, too’, Ben-Natan said after the Gazan engineer appeared in court on Thursday…His lawyer also argued that should it emerge that Israeli intelligence abducted Abu Sisi from the Ukraine, they will have many questions to answer to as their acts will have been in contradiction of international law and treaties between the Ukraine and Israel. ‘There is an extradition convention between the Ukraine and Israel. The European extradition convention applies and both states are party to it and the procedure which was going on in this case was contrary to that convention and to international law’, said Ben-Natan”.

Court today: Gaza Power Plant's Dirar Abu Sisi will be held two more days

The Petah Tikva Court that last week ordered a partial lifting of the gag order that prohibited publication in Israel of news about the imprisonment — in Israel — of Gaza Power Plant’s Deputy Director of Operations, Dirar Abu Sisi, ordered today that he be held for (at least) another two days.

The hearing was closed to the media, according to Israel’s YNet news website.

Abu Sisi was reportedly grabbed while travelling on a train in the Ukraine on 18-19 February and subsequently transferred in Mossad custody and in in rather short order to Israel.

YNet reported here that Abu Sisi’s two lawyers, Smadar Ben-Natan and Tal Linoi, Dirar Abu Sisi’s attorneys “claim he is in poor physical and mental condition, but is cooperating with investigators”, and they said “the engineer told them that he was forcibly removed from his train compartment and brought handcuffed and hooded to an apartment. He said at least six Israeli agents interrogated him before flying him to Israel”.

The YNet report added that “much of the remaining details surrounding the case remain under a gag order”.

Abu Sisi has not yet been charged with anything, though he has been held by force, at first partially incommunicado for some two weeks, under constant lengthy interrogations. He has been in Shikma Prison in Ashkelon for almost two weeks, and may have been in a Shin Bet facility near Petah Tikva for the first two weeks he has been in Israel.

UPDATE: Jonathan Cook has reported that “One of his Israeli lawyers, Smadar Ben Nathan, who met him for the first time at the court hearing on Sunday to lift the gag order, said she believed Israel had carried out the operation based on false information. She called the abduction a ‘miscalculation’, saying interrogators had dropped their original line of questioning. She said the gag order meant she could not discuss the case further”.

Cook added that “Ben Nathan said her client had lost a great deal of weight and his health was deteriorating after more than a month incommunicado. His family is concerned that he is being tortured. Although the Mossad is suspected of carrying out many assassinations on foreign soil — including a hit on a Hamas leader, Mahmoud al Mabhouh, in a Dubai hotel last year — there are few examples of it seizing individuals in foreign countries to bring them to trial. Ben Nathan said she could identify only two similar cases: Israeli agents captured the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, and smuggled Mordechai Vanunu, a nuclear whisteblower, out of Italy in 1986. Victor Kattan, an international law expert at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, said Israel had broken several human rights laws in seizing him rather than invoking treaty agreements between the Ukraine and Israel and requesting his extradition”. This article can be read in full here, or here.

Foreign Press Association in Israel protests security abuse before Netanyahu press conference

The Foreign Press Association (FPA) in Israel issued a formal protest about security abuse and harassment of journalists trying to enter a press conference that was given on Tuesday evening by Israel’s Prime Minister Benyahim Netanyahu.

“All Government Press Office (GPO) cardholders are known to authorities + have already undergone extensive background checks”, the FPA protest noted.

Citing “despicable treatment” in security checks prior to the Netanyahu press conference, the FPA said in a statement that “it is not remotely acceptable to invite people for cocktails at a five-star hotel and then make them undress at the door”.

The FPA said, in a decision approved by its board, that it is “outraged over the treatment members received at the hands of Israeli security personnel at Tuesday’s invitation-only event with the Prime Minister”, and added that it is “incomprehensible that anyone would think such humiliating treatment is necessary at such an event”.

The Israeli news website YNet.com reported in some gruesome detail, here the experience of an Al-Jazeera team.

The Israeli General Security Service (GSS, or Shabak, or Shin Bet) commented cooly to YNet that “All guests were subjected to a security check in accordance with the customary security procedures in such events. Three female reporters refused to be examined under these procedures and chose not to attend the event.”

Al-Jazeera producer/reporter Najwan Simri Diab commented to YNet: “So what? Am I supposed to feel better because others are humiliated? I felt I was being humiliated for the sake of humiliation”.

She reported that “Before our arrival, I received an angry phone call from our photographer, who was asked to arrive two hours earlier. He said everyone was allowed in apart from him and that all of his equipment was taken apart, including the screws of his camera’s battery. He said he and his assistant were asked to undress” … [When she and another reporter and their bureau chief arrived, she said, she complained, after waiting for more than half an hour] “that she couldn’t stand up much longer because of her pregnancy. The security guards told her to sit down and wait. They later took me downstairs to the security check cell. They asked me to take off my coat and then my vest. I did. Then they asked me to take off my shirt. I took a deep breath and did it. I was left with just my undershirt and trousers, without my shoes and the rest of my equipment. The female officer felt me with her hands for 15 minutes in any place possible. I told her I was pregnant and asked her not to use the manual device, but compromised on that later too’ … she was later asked to remove her bra. ‘After she examined the bra under my undershirt, she asked me to take it off as well. I asked why, but she insisted. Her supervisor came over later and insisted as well. I refused, and she said, ‘Everyone removed it and so will you.’ I said, ‘I’m not taking it off even if I can’t go in.’ And she said, ‘So you won’t go in.’ According to Simri-Diab, men saw her too. ‘A spokesperson from the office saw me in my undershirt and asked what was going on. When I told him what happened, he said, ‘Don’t create a drama.’ The woman at the security check told him, ‘She refuses to be checked’. They sent me aside for 20 minutes and refused to return my belongings. They checked every single paper and document in my purse. They later returned all my items inside a box, and I had to arrange them for a long time’.”

Menahem Kahana, a press photographer for 23 years, told Haaretz that ” ‘We waited 20 minutes on the side after the security man stopped us … Afterward they took me down to a room for a security check’. Kahana said he was checked with a hand-held security wand, and then asked to remove his trousers. ‘I refused and told them I was going to leave, but the security man said I was in the middle of ‘a security process’ and could not leave. They simply went crazy’.” This Haaretz report is posted here

The Haaretz report added that “The secretary of the Foreign Press Association, Glenys Sugarman, told Haaretz: The Shin Bet [security service] responded by saying that the people who were asked to strip had not cooperated during the regular procedure. But that is a crude lie. In the United States they also do security checks, but the difference is that the security people are not allowed to act in a humiliating, insulting and hostile manner. To hold people for hours and threaten them with arrest is unacceptable to us. It’s terrible treatment’.”

The new Director of the Government Press office, Oren Helman, told Haaretz that many Arab journalists did attend, despite the security procedures. ” ‘I certainly intend to investigate the association’s complaint and ask for answers from those responsible for the check – the Shin Bet’, he continued. “I regret the mishap. We invited the journalists and clearly the intent was for them to get into the event … unfortunately the mishaps that occured are not our responsibility”…

As Dimi Reider reported for +972 Magazine, here the formal protest issued by the Foreign Press Association (FPA) suggested that the organization “will decline further invitations unless given assurances this will not recur”.

In a comment on Reider’s piece, Tahel Ilan wrote: “For the rest of the foreign journalists to attend the event after having experienced similar ‘security checks’ or after realizing this was happening to others, is in a sense, like crossing the picket line. If the FPA wants to get the message across they need to show the PM office that none of them will stand for it, not that some of them will stand for it. And in a case like this, where not only the FPA needs the PM office in order to make their living, the PM office needs the FPA just as much in order to get their ‘Hasbara’ out, it should be made very clear to the PM office that if the GSS doesn’t act according to appropriate and respectable standards, the FPA won’t be willing to play the ‘Hasbara’ game anymore”.

Israeli forces reportedly protect Palestinian President and PM in West Bank

It’s bad enough that the convoys of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, careen around the cities in the West Bank at 150 kilometers per hour, and that their security forces are posted every ten meters on the routes they are planning to take, and that they stop traffic coming anywhere near these convoys for many minutes on end, sometimes causing massive traffic jams that take an hour or more to untangle in the hot, hot midday sun.

It’s even worse that the Palestinian security forces guarding these two official’s routes are sometimes way-too-trigger-happy. One case in point – the shootout over parking spaces in Bethlehem during the 6th Fatah General Conference. Another recent case-in-point – the shooting of a young man in Ramallah who came too close to the convoy of Abbas’ aide Tayeb Abdul Rahim.

Now, it is reported, in Haaretz today, that “Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are guarded by Israel’s Shin Bet security service on some of their trips around the West Bank. According to an agreement between Israel and the PA, a team from the Shin Bet’s VIP security unit accompanies Abbas and Fayyad whenever they are in Area C, meaning that part of the West Bank that is under full Israeli control according to the Oslo accords. On Tuesday, for instance, Fayyad visited several villages near Nablus to inaugurate new wells. Because the trip going back and forth between Area C and Area B (where Israel has security control but the PA is in charge of civilian matters), Fayyad’s convoy also included an Israel Police patrol car, representatives of Israel’s Civil Administration and a jeep full of Shin Bet bodyguards. These guards were responsible for Fayyad’s security in Area C, while his Palestinian bodyguards – members of the PA’s Presidential Guard – took over in Area B. Israel Defense Forces sources told Haaretz that the security procedures for guarding Abbas and Fayyad on their trips through the West Bank stem from Israel’s desire to avoid having armed Palestinian guards open fire in Area C should their charges come under attack … The security Israel provides for Abbas and Fayyad is meant to prevent either of two possible scenarios. One is an assassination attempt by Palestinian extremists, such as the Hamas cell that was recently arrested for allegedly planning an attack on Abbas. The other is an assassination attempt by right-wing Israeli extremists. Fayyad’s spokesman, Jamal Zakut, declined to comment on this report. However, both Palestinian security sources and the Shin Bet confirmed it. ‘The Shin Bet guards the Palestinian Authority president and the PA prime minister according to regulations, and in full, orderly coordination with all the security services’, the Shin Bet said.”

The Haaretz article added that the Shin Bet is “responsible for round-the-clock protection of only seven [Israeli] people defined as ‘symbols of the state”: the prime minister, the president, the defense minister, the foreign minister, the Knesset speaker, the leader of the opposition and the president of the Supreme Court … All other senior officials are guarded by their offices’ own security guards rather than by the Shin Bet”. This Haaretz article can be read in full here.

This evening, Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency reported that “Israel does not provide protection for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas or Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, spokesman for the Palestinian Security Services Adnan Ad-Dameri said Thursday … ‘This news is not true’, Ad-Dameri said over the phone, ‘the Israeli media says so to misrepresent and to harm the status of the Palestinian Authority’. He assured Israel has “nothing to do with the security of the Palestinian President.” This report can be read in full here.

Who do you believe – the Shin Bet when it says it provided protection for the Palestinian President and Prime Minister, or the spokesman for the Palestinian Security Services, who denies it???

BBC: Israel security chief says no security need to continue building The Wall

The BBC has reported that “The head of Israel’s security service has said there is no security reason for continuing construction of Israel’s barrier through the West Bank. Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin told a parliamentary committee that Israel had enough capabilities to prevent attacks from the Palestinian territory. Since building began years ago, Israel has maintained that it is a security measure to keep out attackers”. here.

Israel's Remembrance Day

This is the day that Israel marks as its Memorial Day, or Remembrance Day.

Haaretz reported that “The total number of those who have been remembered by this Memorial Day is 22,570 [n.b., mainly fallen soldiers but also civilian victims of terror attacks]. The dead who are counted date from 1860, when Jews first settled outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem”. Haaretz added that, according to the Defense Ministry, “133 soldiers and civilians died during the past year either in the course of military service or as civilian casualties of hostile activity”. This Haaretz report can be read in full here

In another article published on this day, Haaretz has repprinted a very famous and very striking photo — looking into the eyes of a young Palestinian just moments before his death — with a brief commentary from the photographer who took it.

Alex Libak or Alex Levac - his photo that exposed a Shin Bet lie

The photographer, Alex Levac, wrote: “I’m returning here to my infamous Bus 300 photo, in which one sees – obviously alive and well – one of two Palestinian hijackers whom the Shin Bet security service claimed had been killed during a hostage rescue. I wouldn’t think of bringing the subject up again if it hadn’t been for the changes in Israeli attitudes toward the Palestinians over the last 25 years. The photo shocked the country in 1984 because it was proof of the lies and criminal acts of the security apparatus. Who would respond these days with the same powerful emotion to the murder of two Palestinian bus hijackers as we did in those innocent times when every injury to a Palestinian, not to mention a killing, led to an investigation? Since then, mutual hatred has only worsened and summary executions have become routine. We have long become insensitive to death, of Jews as well as Palestinians”.

The photographer ended with these words: “A short philosophical remark is in order here about the essence of photographs. The power of this photo lies in what it doesn’t show, the moment after, the moment when skulls were smashed, an act former Shin Bet agent Ehud Yatom later admitted to. The moment of the unbearable lightness of death”.

But, he also wrote in his commentary that “the thought that evokes the greatest sadness is whether we can say with certainty in 2009 that the Israeli media is the watchdog of democracy”. This commentary can be read in full as posted here.

Continue reading Israel's Remembrance Day