Inside Israel’s Palestinian jails: A secret world of murderers and gun-runners – and the innocent

May 1997: Robert Fisk investigates Israel’s Palestinian jails and finds that not all who are there are guilty of crimes

Some of the individuals imprisoned by Israel (The Independent)

Some of them are smiling confidently, others stare hopelessly into the camera lens, men like 70-year-old Palestinian Mohamed Ahmed el-Nayerat, sentenced to life imprisonment for killing a Jewish settler and burying his body in concrete. He worked for the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine and has spent 30 years in Israel’s prisons. His features seem dead, those of a man who knows he will never leave jail alive.

Some are younger, like 30-year-old Hezbollah member Ali Belhas, sentenced to life for attacking Israel’s occupation forces inside southern Lebanon; he has spent just four years in the high security Ashkelon prison in central Israel, fitted out with a false leg to take the place of the one he lost when an Israeli helicopter pilot fired several bullets into his foot as he tried to rescue a wounded fellow guerrilla. He may smile jauntily for his relatives back home in the south Lebanese village of Siddiqin but he has carefully hidden his false left leg from the camera. More than 30 members of his family were slaughtered last year when Israel bombarded the United Nations base at Qana, in which they had sought protection.

The inmates’ photographs – a rare look into the secret world of Israel’s prisons – were sent to families in Jordan and Lebanon, along with letters carried by the International Red Cross. Israel forbids the men to be photographed in their regulation prison uniforms and prison walls must not appear in the snapshots. So the lifers of Ashkelon pose for their relatives in T-shirts and jeans, the walls behind them draped in flower-patterned carpets or sheets, looking for all the world – some of them – like guest workers or young men posing for pre-marriage snapshots. But the only marriage in Ashkelon is the men’s allegiance to the militia groups of which they remain members, their “officers” still giving orders to Hezbollah men and members of Fatah and the PFLP within Israel’s top security jail.