RAMALLAH – A Palestinian women freed this weeks after six years in detention on charges of resisting the Israeli military occupation is speaking out against "horrific mistreatment" and "hair-raising episodes" in Israeli jails.
"They beat us, they kicked us, they humiliated us. They treated us as if we were animals," Sherine Sheikh Khalil, 24, told IslamOnline.net in an exclusive interview.
"It is really difficult to communicate to you the bestiality and savagery of their behavior," added the young activist from the central Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis.
In 2003, then only 17, Sherine was convicted by an Israeli military court of taking part in an attempted abduction of a Jewish settler in the West Bank.
She was freed on Sunday after the end of her jail term.
Though Sherine’s father, brothers and sisters live in Ramallah, the capital of the occupied West Bank, the Israeli occupation regime decided to expel her to the Gaza Strip, apparently as an act of further punishment.
"I’m happy that I’m free, but I wish I could see my family in Ramallah."
According to Human rights groups in Gaza, Israel has deported around 30 West Bankers to the coastal enclave since the beginning of Al-Aqsa Intifada in late September 2000.
Sherine describes the Israeli courts as "a system of retribution and reprisal" rather than a "system of justice."
"You can’t really speak about a genuine justice system in Israel," she insists.
"We are talking about a country that sanctions murder of non-Jews, theft of their property and demolition of their homes. It is a state that uses every conceivable extenuating circumstances to exonerate Jewish murderers of Palestinians while concocting all sorts of pretexts to condemn and incriminate Palestinians."
Sherine said the courts were no more than a tool in the hands of the Israeli regime to inflict harm on the Palestinian people and give false legitimacy to the military occupation.
There are more than 11,000 Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails.
Many of them are political activists, local politicians and community leaders held for years without charge or trials.
Human rights groups operating in the Occupied territories often call these detainees "hostages" or "bargaining chips" used by Israel to wrest political concessions from resistance groups and the West-backed Palestinian Authority (PA).
Draconian
Farwana told IOL Israel has lately been introducing "draconian" measures against the detainees for the sole purpose of "exacting revenge."
Sherine, who left behind dozens of other Palestinian women detainees, spoke of an entire regime of "provocations and punishments" that is constantly haunting Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails and dungeons.
Some of the women detainees, she said, were forced to give birth in jail with their hands cuffed and feet fettered with shackles.
The Palestinian activist said the latest reprisal was transferring many of Palestinian detainees into wards with Israeli hardcore criminals.
"We are talking about people who are the lowest of the low," Sherine complained.
"So, imagine yourself spending your days and nights with murderers, drug addicts, prostitutes, and all types of deviant people."
She suspects that Israeli prison officials were conniving with the criminals to harm or at least harass Palestinian detainees, something she said happened on numerous occasions.
Abdul Nasser Farwana, the head of the Statistics Department of the Prisoners’ Ministry in Ramallah, told IOL persecution of detainees included tightening of headscarves to the point of strangulation.
He said Israel has lately been introducing "draconian" measures against the detainees for the sole purpose of "exacting revenge."
Some of these measures are directed specifically at Hamas supporters, but other detainees, including those affiliated with Fatah and the Islamic Jihad, are being affected.
A few years ago, Israel created the "Nachshon force" whose main task is to suppress and savage Palestinian detainees.
The new Israeli government, led by hawkish Benyamin Netanyahu, has admitted that harsher measures are being introduced, mainly to force Hamas to relax its conditions for the release of an Israeli soldier captured nearly three years ago.
This includes decreased food in both quality and quantity, confiscation of transistor radios, no books, less family visits, and deliberate medical negligence, which has already led to the death of at least two detainees.
Asked what she thought was the most difficult period during her six-year incarceration, Sherine said there were "ups and downs" in the level of mistreatment.
"It depends on the prison officials’ mood, sometimes they would storm our ward after midnight in order to frisk us. And this could be especially humiliating as this is done in full view of a male officer accompanying female wardens," she said.
"You see the real motive behind this provocative act is just to humiliate us and torment us emotionally. They wanted to break our will and destroy our dignity. But, of course, we are stronger than all their virulent tactics."
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