Year: 2020

I gave a guy a hitch/tremp the other day. It transpired he is closely involved in the Duma case (the arson which killed three members of the Dawabsheh family).

During the ride, he told me about an astounding aspect of the case which was unfamiliar to me, and probably to you too, as the only media outlet which has agreed to publish the story was Haaretz (in their Premium section).

You will recall that on 2nd August, 2015, the Israeli Cabinet approved introducing “extraordinary measures” in interrogating suspects of Jewish terror.

It has been widely reported that these measures included administrative detention (ie imprisonment for long periods without charges or trial), physical force (stretching, electrocution), sleep deprivation (considered a form of torture under international law) and causing emotional stress (harassment, sexual assault).

My passenger told me about an additional level of “extraordinary measures” which have recently been used for interrogating and extracting confessions from Jewish suspects, which sound like a B Movie script.

There is a disused British Prison in Acco (not the public museum, but a different building near the current day police station) which was converted by the police, for the purpose of extracting confessions from “Jewish terror” suspects,  into a fully functioning mock prison.

All the people in the prison, the guards, the prison service officers, and the prisoners, both Jews and Arabs, were all undercover policemen, acting in these roles.

The only ‘real’ characters were the Jewish suspects. These suspects were held totally separately from each other, and report similar treatment.

…

Shortly after his arrest, Klimkovitz found himself in this fake Acco prison, in the same cell together with “dangerous long term prisoners”, including murderers, gang members, drug dealers, etc. Most of the prisoners were Arabs.

During his incarceration, he was witness to a “stabbing murder” of an Arab prisoner by a Jewish prisoner armed with a knife. There was blood everywhere, a dead body, a hasty washing off of the knife to remove fingerprints, and general panic among the prisoners. The prison authorities, batons swinging, launched an investigation.

The prisoners then turned on Klimkovitz, knowing he was a witness to the murder, and a new inmate, and they accused him of being an informer or undercover cop. They beat him, including kicking him in his testicles and threatened his life.

In order to ‘clear himself’ of the allegation and violent consequences of being an informer (the lowest class of prisoner and open game for retaliation), he was told he must tell them what crimes he had committed so that his identity as a genuine criminal could be verified by their friends outside, and so that the prisoners would have leverage to use against him to ensure his silence. This would avoid him being labeled and punished/silenced as an informer.

…

Placing a minor into a prison of adults is against the law; however, the prosecution are arguing that it wasn’t a real prison, so that law didn’t apply. The defence is arguing that subjectively, the boys believed they were in a real prison, with real prisoners and real threats – therefore this constituted illegal incarceration and unlawful pressure.