Blog 30

Military Court – Ofer

The taxi ride from Ramallah to the Israeli military court at Ofer takes about twenty minutes along a pot holed lane passing rubbish tips and sewerage works. The “court” is next door to the prison which is constructed in the same fashion as the Wall – large concrete slabs punctuated with heavily fortified watchtowers. Ofer is on the Palestinian side of the Green Line (the de facto border between Israel and the West Bank) but it has now, for all practical purposes, been illegally incorporated into Israel by the Wall and lies between the Wall and the Green Line. Even on the permit forms that Palestinians must fill in to visit relatives in the prison, Offer is described as a “prison in Israel”.

About a kilometer from the prison we come to a gate in the Wall (which at this location consists of a number of electric fences). We get out of the car and approach the soldiers on foot. The soldier I talk to is from West Ham in London and lives just around the corner from Smita. After explaining that we are three lawyers from Amsterdam, London and Sydney visiting the “court” with a local lawyer we are allowed to get back into the taxi and proceed along the road which has now been reduced to a dirt track.

On arrival at the complex we meet up with S., a local lawyer. We pass a long line of mostly Palestinian women waiting to gain access and pass through the usual security checks with the additional item of having all mobile phones with cameras taken from us. The “court” consists of around eight prefabricated huts, one for administrative detention, one for extension of interrogation period applications and the others for prosecuting breaches of one or more of the 1500 military orders that govern Palestinian life in the West Bank.

We enter the hut for interrogation period applications. It is small, 15 meters by 5 meters, and crowded. There is a military “judge”, a military translator, various other military personnel, four policemen with M-16s, three prisoners in brown uniforms with their legs shackled, a couple of lawyers, some family members, the four of us and two Israeli women taking notes for a human rights NGO. On the table by the “judge” are piles and piles of files. Each case lasts only about five minutes. The applications in this hut are brought by the military prosecutor seeking authorization to interrogate a detainee for longer than the initial eight day period. The evidence supporting these applications is secret and the judge very rarely questions, let alone looks at the secret file. This is not a court it is an administrative production line.

Fifteen minutes into proceedings a 15 year old boy shuffles in to the clinking sound of his leg irons. He was arrested on 24 January 2007 for throwing stones at an army jeep near his village. He has confessed and receives a sentence of 80 days imprisonment. In practice little distinction is made between juvenile prisoners and adults, as is required under international law. One concession that is made for children is that those between the ages of 12 and 14 can only be given a maximum sentence of 6 months.

The one aspect of the morning that sticks in my mind the most were the hurried glances between detainees and family members as they tried to communicate with their hands or with facial expressions and how they all said goodbye with their eyes.