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Rights group slams Israeli treatment of prisoners
Israel's Shin Bet internal security service prevents as many as 90 percent of its Palestinian prisoners from consulting a lawyer during their interrogation and exposes them to abysmal detention conditions and torture, an Israeli human rights group claimed in a report.
The document, jointly issued this week by The Public Committee Against Torture and the Palestinian Prisoners' Society, said the inmates were often shackled to a chair for prolonged periods, deprived of sleep, isolated in foul-smelling cells and repeatedly threatened that they and their families would be harmed.
"This is all aimed at getting the detainee to reach his breaking point as fast as possible and make a confession," said Maya Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, who wrote the document for the human rights groups. "He is put under massive pressure - physical, mental and emotional."
Data collected by the groups showed that denial of legal access to Palestinian detainees was the rule rather than the exception.
Between 70 percent and 90 percent of the 11,790 Palestinian detainees from the West Bank who were questioned by the Shin Bet between 2000 and 2007 were denied access to a lawyer for part or the entire time of their interrogation, the report said. About half of them went for two weeks or more without seeing an attorney, it added.