Human Rights Watch Report: “Palestinian Authority and Hamas Continue Detainment and Torture”

The Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in the Gaza Strip continue to arrest and torture critics and peaceful Palestinian opponents, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.
“The systematic torture by the Palestinian authorities (in the West Bank and Gaza) may amount to a crime against humanity and can be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court,” it said in its annual report at the Millennium Hotel in Ramallah.
The report, entitled “Two Sultans, One Way, Opposition Prohibited: Arbitrary Detention and Torture under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas”.
In the 25 years since Palestinians gained a degree of self-rule over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, their authorities have reportedly established machineries of repression to crush dissent, including through the use of torture.
Both the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in Gaza have in recent years carried out scores of arbitrary arrests for peaceful criticism of the authorities, particularly on social media, among independent journalists, on university campuses, and at demonstrations.
As the Fatah-Hamas feud deepened despite attempts at reconciliation, PA security services have targeted supporters of Hamas and vice versa. Relying primarily on overly broad laws that criminalize activity such as causing “sectarian strife” or insulting “higher authorities,” the PA and Hamas use detention to punish critics and deter them and others from further activism. In detention, security forces routinely taunt, threaten, beat, and force detainees into painful stress positions for hours at a time, the report stated.
This report is the result of a two-year investigation conducted by Human Rights Watch into patterns of arrest and detention conditions. It draws on 86 cases in the West Bank and Gaza, which show that Palestinian authorities routinely arrest people whose peaceful speech displeases them and torture those in their custody.
These findings emerge from interviews with 147 persons, most of them ex-detainees, but also family members, lawyers, NGO representatives, and a doctor; and a review of photographic and video evidence, medical reports, and court documents.
Both authorities have however mechanisms in place to receive complaints from citizens and concerned organizations and investigate potential wrongdoing by security forces, but, according to information provided by the security agencies to Human Rights Watch, these rarely lead to a finding of wrongdoing, much less disciplinary measures or prosecutions for serious abuses, further noted the Human Rights Watch fact-finding report.
There has been so far no immediate response from the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to this human rights report.