Screenshot: Ya’alon; Video credit: Inouim B’Mishpat Duma
Thursday, April 23, 2020, 14:07 In July 2015, the Dawabsheh family’s house in Kfar Duma was set on fire in an arson attack. The second video in the series “Exposing the Duma Blood Libel” posits that the authorization for the illegal torture underwent by Amiram Ben Uliel during GSS interrogations was obtained through lies and deception. The video states that the GSS interrogators and the Justice Ministry personnel knowingly lied when they claimed that Ben Uliel constituted a “ticking time-bomb threat”, and therefore the torture was illegal.
In the video, Ben Uliel describes how he was tortured by the interrogators: “They sat me on the chair, with my shoulder towards the back rest and forced my legs behind the chair legs. They positioned me with my back about 45 degrees backwards. The pain was extreme. I screamed horribly, and they didn’t pay any attention to me. Yells, screams, beatings, stabbing…”
The question is, “Was the torture inflicted on Amiram legal?” The video explains that it was not. In a democratic country, in order to prevent false confessions, applying physical violence on an interrogee is forbidden. So why were the interrogees in the Kfar Duma case tortured?
The torture inflicted on interrogees in the case was authorized by the highest ranks of the Justice Ministry after the GSS interrogators claimed that the interrogation was preemptive and intended to prevent an additional incident. In a preemptive interrogation regarding a “ticking time-bomb”, when the interrogee is concealing information liable to pose an immediate danger to human lives, the law permits an interrogator to use violence on the interrogee in order to save lives.
Therefore the GSS and the Justice Ministry claimed that the interrogees in the Kfar Duma case were “ticking time-bombs”. The video proposes that the GSS and the Justice Ministry knowingly lied about this matter. Once the interrogations were over, it turned out that the GSS no longer claimed that a future act had been prevented, and human lives were not saved by torturing interrogees in the case.
Additionally, even if the GSS had really believed that the interrogees held information that could immediately save human lives, why did Ben Uliel turn into a “ticking time-bomb” only after 17 days of remand? Moreover, Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon, then Defense Minister, claimed months before the detention of the suspects that the security system knew who carried out the arson attack, but refrained from detaining them in order not to reveal sources.
In light of this, how could it be that for months there was no urgency to detain the arsonists, and suddenly, approximately two weeks after the suspects were detained, they had to be tortured because they were concealing a “ticking time-bomb”? The video reaches the conclusion that the torture was carried out against the law and that the GSS interrogators and the Justice Ministry knowingly lied in order to carry out an illegal action liable to put an innocent man in prison. The conclusion of the video states that a criminally conducted investigation such as this and a confession extracted under the clear threat of being returned to instruments of torture, cannot result in revealing the truth.
Ori Kirshenbaum, Honenu: “The public is crying out over the contemptible conduct of [former State Prosecutor] Shai Nitzan and his cronies. This is nothing new for us. Members of the top echelons in the State of Israel, knowingly and unknowingly, were part of the cruel manipulations that gave legitimacy to the torture of interrogees for one purpose only: declaring that the Kfar Duma case had been solved. We hope that the court will put an end to this insanity and not participate in the imprisonment of an innocent man for the rest of his life.”
“Exposing the Duma Blood Libel” – Part 1
“Exposing the Duma Blood Libel” – Part 3
“Exposing the Duma Blood Libel” – Part 4