By Rasha Hirzullah

RAMALLAH, Saturday, March 16, 2019 (WAFA) - As Sujoud was browsing the social media network, a video appeared on one of the news sites that showed Israeli soldiers from the ultra-orthodox Nitzah Yehuda unit in a military vehicle brutally beating and torturing two prisoners after their detention.

The prisoners were handcuffed and blindfolded, with blood visible on one‘s face. The soldiers were cursing them with all kinds of profane words while the prisoners were screaming in pain as the soldiers laughed.

At first sight, Sujoud did not recognize the two prisoners. The shock came when she read the headline on the video that said: "Israeli soldiers torturing detainees Ziad Shalaldeh and his son Mahmoud in a brutal way during their arrest." She realized they were her father and brother.

Sujoud ran to her mother Khadija to show her the video. They both were horrified but what they saw and broke out into hysterical crying.

On January 8, a large Israeli army force raided the tent residence of Ziad Shalaldeh, 44, a Bedouin who lives in the village of Abu Shkheidem, northwest of Ramallah, and arrested him and his son Mahmoud, 21, and took them to an unknown destination.

Khadija said that dozens of soldiers broke during the night into their tents. They dragged her on the ground while beating and shouting insults on the other members of her family of 14 individuals, mostly children. The soldiers even deliberately let their dogs loose at them to frighten the children and adults.

"When I tried to protect my children and to calm their horrors, the soldiers shouted at me and dragged me on the ground for a long distance. They forced us to sit in an open area on a very cold night. I told them to get the dogs away, but they refused. They tied my husband to the tent’s pole and started to beat him up with a belt in front of us. They did the same thing with my son Mahmoud," said Khadija.

This went on for three hours, which Khadija said were the most difficult in her life. After that, the Israeli soldiers took her husband and son into the military jeep and arrested them.

Khadija did not know what happened to her husband and her son after that, despite the fact that one of the lawyers told her that they were brutally kicked around by the soldiers with their army boots and beaten all over their bodies with rifle butts. The father was seriously injured in the right rib and had a broken nose that caused him to lose consciousness which required that he be taken to hospital where he stayed for three days during which he underwent an operation in the nose to be later transferred to the infamous Russian Compound detention center in West Jerusalem for interrogation.

From what the mother was also told was that the Israeli forces lied to her son and told him that his father has died as a kind of psychological torture. This is what the expert in international law Hanna Issa saw as proof that the occupation authorities are practicing torture against detainees during their detention, which is prohibited by the 1984 Convention against Torture.

Khadija never imagined that her husband and son would be in such a bad shape after she was able to see them for the first time on February 5 in the courtroom.

"When they brought them to court they were shackled. My husband could barely walk. His face was swollen and blue, especially around the nose and eyes to a point he could not see well. I tried to talk to them, but I couldn’t. I saw them from a distance. They were clearly distressed and fatigued."

The video footage of the torture of Ziad and his son Mahmoud in the army jeep was taken by one of the Israeli soldiers who took part in the arrest, who filmed it with his cell phone. The tape went viral on social media. This, nevertheless, was not the first time soldiers have brutally abused Palestinian detainees.

Issa pointed out that what the occupation authorities are doing is completely contrary to the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 on how to treat people under occupation, protect their property and to provide them with their rights. It also is in violation of the Convention’s 1977 Protocol.

He said that the video proves that war crimes have been committed against the Palestinian people and according to international law the perpetrators of the crimes must be referred to the International Criminal Court to hold them accountable for their crimes.

"But it should be noted that according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of 1998, which considers the court as a complementary judiciary, it must be preceded by a trial of the perpetrators of the crimes in their country, which requires that the Israeli government must prosecute these soldiers and punish them in the beginning,” said Issa. “However, the Israeli judiciary is an accomplice in the crime and is not fair. It does not do what is required, which means that the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Fatou Bensouda should start investigation procedures based on the articles of the Convention."

The Israeli judiciary is often an accomplice in many crimes committed against Palestinians, as in the case of the Israeli soldier Ellior Azaria, who was sentenced for few months and was released from prison despite the fact that he shot dead in execution style that was caught on camera of a wounded Palestinian, Abdul Fattah Sharif, on March 24, 2016, in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron in the south of the West Bank.

If the perpetrator of this crime was not held accountable for his action, who would?

M.K.