JERUSALEM (Ma’an) — Israeli authorities on Friday transferred two East Jerusalem Palestinian detainees to administrative detention without charge or trial, where they will reportedly be kept for the next six months.
Amjad Abu Asab, who is head of an East Jerusalem committee of prisoners’ families, told Ma’an that Israel transferred Amjad al-Natsheh, 20, from Anata and Sadeq Ghaith from Silwan for six months of administrative detention.
Al-Natsheh was detained four days ago as a result of a Facebook post in which he said he wished to die as a “martyr.” Abu Asab said that Israeli interrogators accused him of planning a terror attack as a result of his post.
Al-Natsheh, however, reportedly denied the charge, saying that the post represented “just a wish.”
Abu Asab said that Ghaith, meanwhile, was detained last Tuesday with his brother Adnan Ghaith, who is the secretary-general of the Fatah movement in Jerusalem.
Administrative detention refers to the tactic of keeping a prisoner without charge or trial for extended periods of time, often due to “security” concerns.
Israel routinely uses this tactic on detained Palestinians, even though international law stipulates it only be used in exceptional circumstances.
According to Israeli human rights groups B’tselem, in Aug. 2014, 473 Palestinians were being kept in administrative detention in Israeli prisons, down from a high of nearly 1,000 in 2002.
More than 1,000 Palestinians from East Jerusalem have been arrested by Israel since June, in one of the biggest campaigns of intimidation and incarceration the holy city has seen in modern history.
Initially, the campaign was launched in response to protests at a major arrest campaign that occurred in the West Bank over summer, but police repression continued as further rallies condemning the Israeli assault on Gaza that left nearly 2,200 continued across East Jerusalem.
Protests against Israeli policies of discrimination in East Jerusalem have again ignited in the wake of a spate of individual Palestinian attacks on Israelis in occupied East Jerusalem, which have been met with harsh police violence that many have deemed “collective punishment.”
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