Imagine my shock and dismay at learning that terrorists don’t make good governments:
Palestinian security forces loyal to Hamas and Fatah have both carried out serious human rights abuses over the past year, including arbitrary arrests and torture, according to a report on the bitter power struggle between the groups.
Human Rights Watch, in the report released on Wednesday, cited a pattern of politically motivated arrests, mock executions and severe beatings in detention centers run by Hamas Islamists in the Gaza Strip and President Mahmoud Abbas’s secular Fatah faction in the West Bank.
It faulted the United States and other donors, who have bankrolled Abbas’s Palestinian Authority and Fatah-dominated security forces, for “not paying adequate attention to the systematic abuses by those forces.” . . .
According to Human Rights Watch, masked Fatah security men in the West Bank have arrested hundreds of Hamas members and supporters without warrants.
The report said Fatah forces often tortured detainees during interrogation, apparently resulting in one death. Torture methods included mock executions, kicks and punches, and beatings with sticks, plastic pipes and hoses, it said.
The most common form of torture was forcing detainees to stay in “stress” positions, a practice known in Arabic as shabah, which causes intense pain and sometimes internal injury but leaves no physical mark, Human Rights Watch said.
Hamas forces in Gaza committed many of the same abuses, including arbitrary detentions accompanied by severe beatings and, in two cases, multiple gunshots at close range to the legs, Human Rights Watch said. In at least three cases, individuals died in custody, apparently from torture, the report said.
Human Rights Watch said Hamas and Fatah have both largely failed to hold accountable security men implicated in abuses.
(Via LGF.)
Another report due to be released shortly reveals that the sun rises in the east, the Pope is Catholic, and water is wet.
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