Many family members of detainees from the Jenin refugee camp have been having trouble sleeping in recent weeks. Not because of their relatives held in Israeli prisons but rather because of their relatives held in Palestinian Authority prisons, and mainly because of rumors - which have been confirmed - of torture at the Preventative Security detention facility in Jericho.

"Palestinian journalists who have made a nice living by writing about the heroism of our camp and from interviewing our fighters aren’t writing about the arrests or at least do not put our version up against the official version," camp resident Abu Anton said bitterly.

The PA´s wave of arrests began on May 2, after shots were fired at the house of Jenin governor Kadura Musa. Two hours later, he died from a heart attack. At the order of Mahmoud Abbas and under the command of Interior Minister Said Abu-Ali, a joint operations room was set up for all the Palestinian security organizations, who are carrying out the arrest operation together.

Very quickly, two residents of the camp turned out to be suspects in the shooting, but the authorities continued to arrest anyone suspected of holding weapons and anyone who is close to someone also deemed a suspect.

Leading the operation is Ibrahim Ramadan, a preventative security officer from the Dheisheh refugee camp, who is accompanied by a legal unit. Extensions of detention are indeed carried out according to Palestinian law, every 15 days.

Also according to the law, after 24 hours detainees must be transferred to general prosecution investigators or military prosecutors. However, in reality detainees are held for weeks by preventative security. Family visits have also been denied - an illegal practice as well.

Arrests with no clear purpose

From the last statement by Palestinian security forces´ spokesman GeneralAdnan Damiri, it looks like anyone who owns a weapon is required to register it and extend the license once a year.

The Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR), an official oversight body that operates in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, told Haaretz last week that this is one of the problems: The wave of arrests, which in the meantime has expanded to Nablus and the Balata refugee camp as well, has been given all sorts of explanations, but from the start no particular objective has been stated.

People with no connection to the shooting were arrested during this wave. A sense of collective punishment was created, even before the ICHR wrote over fifty affidavits regarding torture and maltreatment of detainees in Jenin and Nablus.

The number of those arrested is somewhere between 120 and 150. Little by little, some of those detained are being released, either because it turned out that they were not connected to any wrongdoing or because they handed their weapons in to the authorities. The reports of their experiences during the weeks in which they were unable to meet with attorneys (or family members) match the rumors and affidavits to ICHR and Al Haq, a non-governmental Palestinian human rights organization.

The detainees were held for long hours and days in the Shabach position - their hands tied behind their back or over their heads with iron restraints, either standing or crouching. Sometimes they were made to stand for an hour or an hour and a half on hummus cans.

"This is an improvement," a friend of one of the detainees joked bitterly, when he heard the testimony last week. "Hamas detainees were made to stand on tea glasses.”

Detainees were imprisoned in the Shabach for various periods of time and kept in solitary confinement, during which time the bag that had been placed on their heads during arrest was replaced.

"My eyes were covered the whole time," one of the detainees told Haaretz. According to the testimonies, security personnel wandered among them, sometimes beating them. When detainees asked to go to the bathroom, the guards delayed. Showers were allowed on very rare occasions.

When the Shabach position period was over, and the detainees were left alone, they managed to exchange information by shouting to each other. Very soon, it became clear who was being interrogated for what. They were then transferred to bigger cells, with a number of detainees in each. At that point, some considered starting a hunger strike, like their brothers in Israeli prisons.

"But we discovered that our guards didn´t care if we eat or not," one released detainee said. Others explained that at the beginning, the guards would not allow them to pray, so they started to pray while handcuffed. The detainees were taken out to a yard for ten minutes at a time – each by himself.

´Suspected of belonging to a criminal gang´

Haaretz did not manage to speak with the spokesperson of the Palestinian security forces, nor the Interior Ministry. Investigators at the Preventative Security prison, who met with ICHR representatives, denied the use of torture.

The interior minister did not deny the claims, but said that these were isolated incidents, not policy. Damiri said in an official interview that whoever feels hurt can file a complaint.

In the official version of Musa’s death, the cause was an attempt on his life, while in the camp they said that the man was suffering from a heart condition, and was also under some distress because of a family issue. According to those in the refugee camp, official spokespersons are presenting the detainees as a group of criminals, thieves and corrupt arms dealers who are responsible for security mayhem. "Suspected of belonging to a criminal gang," was written on the request to extend the detention of most of the detainees.

"A criminal gang? My son?" fumes Amina Dabaya, the mother of one of the detainees, 30-year-old Ra´ed.

Ra´ed, a Fatah operative and former prisoner in Israel, currently working with Palestinian intelligence, was arrested by Palestinian security forces in his office. Another one of Dabaya´s sons is still in prison in Israel.

"Only four years ago, Mahmoud Abbas honored two of my sons who were killed by the army," she told Haaretz in the green garden that she maintains on the edge of the camp, her way of soothing her soul. Her younger son was killed in a demonstration during the Second Intifada, her second was killed in an exchange of fire.

"I heard about the honor on the television. I did not see anything substantial in it. And now you come here and detain my son? This is the honor that you bestow on us? I know they put a bag on his head, and that his shoulder was dislocated from the Shabach position. I am not allowed to visit him. For ten years I have been running between prisons and graveyards, what is that? They play with them as if they were footballs. This time with you, this time with the Jews?"

Two of 70-year-old Alia Aamer´s sons were detained during the current wave of arrests. "Kadura [Musa] was like my son. I mourned him. But his death was from God, natural," Aamer, known as Umm Ziad in the camp, told Haaretz. "They used his death to attack everybody. There were some who shot at Kadura, but not everybody. Now everybody has turned into collaborators that have to be arrested?”

Her eldest son Ziad set up the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin, and was killed in a battle the first day the IDF went into the camp on April 3, 2002. He was a Fatah operative who sat in an Israeli jail for 17 years until he was released under the Oslo Accords. Like many of his friends, he was enlisted in the Palestinian preventative security forces.

His peers in prison remember with pride how he attacked a prison guard who loved to humiliate them. He was, and remains, a hero in the eyes of many. One of Ziad’s friends who rose in the ranks of the PA related how, at the beginning of the 1990s, Ziad was fed up with what he saw as the depravity of Fatah and its shift from a liberation movement to a ruling party, even before bringing the nation its promised independence.

Most of those arrested in the current wave are members of Fatah, except three who are identified with the Jihad (and who have already been released), and Mu´ayyed Aamer, another of Alia´s sons. Mu’ayyed, affiliated with Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was arrested many times by Israel for administrative detention. He has a clothes stall in the market, and always refused to join any security force. According to rumors from prison, it seems that he was under investigation for weapons that people of the Popular Front held as they marched, masked, during some demonstration.

Ahmad is the second of Alia Aamer’s to be arrested. He is a Fatah member and a member of the preventative security. Another son of hers is a police officer, and a fourth son belongs to the National Security. Her many grandchildren sit and listen to her when she fumes over the slander.

"Damiri said on television that they are thieves?” she says. “In front of the whole world? Aren´t you ashamed of this lie? We have no land and we have no factories or companies. See how much debt our children have to the Palestinian banks? Who stole? Only those who have, the big ones. We are refugees. All the talking that officials do on TV is meant to justify their status."

This is the profile similar to that of all the detainees from the camp, most of whom are also connected through family ties. Their relatives - a brother, a mother, some cousins - were killed by the army whether as civilians or as members of an armed group. They were detained by Israel, sentenced or placed under administrative detention, and have other relatives in Israeli detention today.

The IDF destroyed their homes in the First (or Second) Intifada; some of their homes were destroyed twice or more. Their entire lives have been lived in the shadow of Israeli weapons and the futile attempts to emulate Israeli militarism. All the Palestinian Authority knew how to do was enlist them in one of their security forces.

A third mother we spoke with, whose son was killed by the army and another son is currently being detained by the PA, said, "If not for the victims in our midst, Abu Amar and his army would not have come here. And Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] would not have been the head of the Palestinian Authority today."

Along with vague official statements about the arrests, rumors have spread that Muhammad Dahlan financed illegal activity of the arrested "gangs.” The rumors say that a lot of money has been circulated, that this is a case of massive arms dealing, and that the weapons used in the shooting at the governor´s house were hidden by Zakaria Zubeidi.

Jamal Zubeidi, or Abu Anton, is the uncle of Zakaria and the brother of Alia Aamer. He calls the rumors on Dahlan and "the large amounts of money" allegedly in the banks "all lies." The rumors, he said, were intended to generate public hostility toward the detainees and a lack of interest in their arrests. He also knows that the investigation found that Zakaria was not aware that the weapons hidden were supposedly his.

All the attention is now focused on the demand that the weapons of the al-Aqsa Martyrs be handed over. Abu Anton also fumes over the claims of "security chaos" that the detainees allegedly caused in the Jenin camp.

"On the contrary,” he says. “Zakaria and his friends always act as intermediaries in internal conflicts." Other residents of Jenin, who support the confiscation of weapons from private individuals and who do not share Anton’s high opinion of his nephew Zakaria, confirm that they did not sense any unusual "lack of security," and say that the official statements are exaggerated.

Chaos and power struggles within the security forces

The “chaos” is within the security system, says Abu Anton. A Fatah activist from the Ramallah area, who had been jailed in Israel in the past for involvement in an armed cell confirms this. According to him, there are power struggles between commanders that influence what happens on the street as well as in the lower ranks. At the end of 2011, Dib Al Ali, former commander of the National Security (an army of sorts), retired. Nidal Abu Dukhan, a former commander of the military intelligence replaced him. Now he is pushing aside those loyal to Al Ali. Two of them were part of those that fired at the Governor´s home.

“Al Ali was also very much liked by Israel and the United States,” says the veteran activist. Al Ali helped head the PA crackdown of Hamas after its electoral victory in 2006. Zakaria Zubeidi and his friends were Al Ali’s most loyal soldiers. “Zakaria was the one to bring Abbas to the camp,” says Abu Anton, “he worked for him during elections.”

The men are convinced that the government in Ramallah, the same one that, according to them, takes its orders from Israel, seeks to suppress the camp due to its pride, its steadfastness and its cohesion. “You give yourself too much credit,” said one of the interrogators in Jericho, according to the testimonies of one of the released detainees.

Within the relations of power in the Palestinian Authority and in Fatah, the veteran Fatah activist said, the weapon is the only capital those activists have.

“Abbas is like a cat that eats its own kittens,” said Umm Ziad, the bereaved mother. “It eats Fatah´s younger generation. Abbas says our children are collaborators? He humiliated us when he said that our children are thieves. Abbas and Abu Amar have a debt. To me. I don’t want Palestine – my son is worth all of Palestine.” (© Copyright 2012 Ha´aretz 06/25/12)