The Detention and Torture of Mahmoud Najjar

By Stephen J. Sosebee

Though my profession is writing, much of my time now is spent arranging medical treatment they cannot get in their homeland for injured Palestinian youths. However, the Israeli incarceration and torture of Mahmoud Najjar, a handsome 17-year-old from the Al Amari refugee camp near Ramallah, is the most difficult challenge I have encountered. In January 1989 he sustained a basal fracture of the left femur after falling off a cliff while being chased by soldiers. Despite application of an internal pin and plate, the fracture failed to unite. Since the plate was removed, Mahmoud has been forced to use crutches. To recover from his injury, he needs an artificial hip joint, which is only available outside of the West Bank.

I first visited Mahmoud at his home after the six-week curfew imposed during the Gulf war had been relaxed. Though still suffering greatly, he was eager to obtain the necessary surgery, as was his mother, who herself had been shot during the infitada.

Although tickets were purchased and hospitals prepared, Mahmoud had been arrested on June 16.

I sent Mahmoud's medical reports to the Rotary Club in Houston, Texas, which agreed to sponsor his operation. I then appealed to a friend, Lucia Smith, who raised donations for his transportation from the Palestinian-American community in Texas. I then returned to Jerusalem at the end of July to pick up Mahmoud and two other boys from Gaza who also had been accepted for medical treatment in the US.

I learned that although tickets were purchased and hospitals prepared, Mahmoud had been arrested on June 16. His lawyer, Mary Rock, informed me that Mahmoud was being held in Ramallah prison without charge.

"He was abused during the interrogation period," she explained. "He has experienced the usual treatment: beatings, being forced into a closet where he stood for days without food. More disturbing is that an investigator, angry when all this failed to make Mahmoud sign a confession, stood on his stomach and injured hip."

Though shocked, neither of us were surprised. It is typical torture. "He is a strong boy, but I think this was too much," Ms. Rock said with a sigh at her Bethlehem office, crowded with the families of clients.

I knew that getting a Palestinian released from prison before his sentence is finished is unlikely, but the brutality of his interrogation made me even more determined to try. He might not be tortured again if the Israeli interrogators knew he had ties to Americans.

For advice I turned to an overworked Israeli lawyer, Tamar Pelleg, who has the complete trust of Muslims, Christians and Jews working for peace and justice in the Holy Land. She advised me to use all channels, including the Hebrew press, to try to get help for Mahmoud.

"But don't get your hopes up," she warned. "He is in the hands of the Shin Bet [internal security police], and they answer only to the prime minister."

Over the next two weeks in August I approached the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, Member of the Knesset Deddi Zucker of the Ratz party, Israeli journalists, Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups such as B'Tselem and Al-Haq, the Committee Against Torture in Israel, the Israeli and Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights, and even the office of Avi Pazner, aide to the prime minister.

MK Zucker promised to look into the matter and advised patience, as "such things take time." The US Embassy officially appealed for Mahmoud's release on humanitarian grounds. The various human rights groups released press statements calling for Mahmoud's immediate release so he could travel to the US for his operation. Journalist Yoram Binur, author of the book My Enemy, My Self, visited Mahmoud's family and publicized the case in Ha'artez.

A "Violent Terrorist"?

Avi Pazner's office informed me over the phone that Mahmoud would not be released because he is a "violent terrorist from the PFLP" and that his medical situation was "not serious. " "You don't allow criminals to walk around free in America do you?" asked a women employee in Pazner's office. "In the US we do not imprison injured 17year-olds without trial and then torture them for a month because we suspect that they did something political to gain their basic rights, " I explained. Like her government, she was unimpressed.

After a month of doing everything short of chaining myself to Ramallah prison to try to get Mahmoud released, I left Jerusalem without him. The two boys from Gaza could no longer wait for their own treatment. The US government's efforts availed nothing, nor did those of MK Zucker.

"He is an Administrative Detainee, " the latter said. "Maybe in six months he will be out. Call me then."

So now it has come down to waiting. Mahmoud waits in a cell. The doctors wait in Texas to operate on a hip that, thanks to the Shin Bet, may be much harder to replace than before. Various Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans wait to meet a grievously injured, polite young man whose detention they seek to end because it is illegal and morally wrong. And Mahmoud's mother waits to see her beloved son able to walk again. For Palestinians like Mahmoud and his mother, waiting is as much a part of life as the rising sun and the changing seasons. They belong to a nation that has waited 43 years for the liberation that, with each passing day and passing season, draws closer.