A library photo of an Israeli “known” prison

LONDON, November 15 (IslamOnline.net) – Scores of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners have been tortured and maltreated by Israeli forces while locked in a secret prison in northern Israel, a leading British newspaper revealed Friday, November 14.

Facility 1391 has been airbrushed from Israeli aerial photographs and purged from modern maps and even the road leading to it has been erased, The Guardian said, adding that where once a police station was marked, there is now a blank space.

The cell is situated inside an army intelligence base close to the main road between Hadera and Afula and home to an army intelligence group, Unit 504, which specializes in interrogation.

For 20 years or more it has been housed in a large, imposing, single-storey building designed by a British engineer, Sir Charles Taggart, during the 1930s, according to the Guardian.

The thick concrete walls and iron gates are themselves protected by a double fence overseen by watchtowers and patrolled by attack dogs.

More recently, scores of Palestinians were incarcerated in 1391 for interrogation, which finally led to the disclosure of a prison the state decreed did not exist, the daily added.

To Mention But A Few

Some inmates broke their silence and spoke about the appalling conditions they suffered and how they were badly maltreated at the hands of Israeli soldiers and intelligence agents.

Sameer Jadala, a 33-year-old Palestinian man who was detained last year in a pre-dawn swoop, told the daily that he was blindfolded, handcuffed and his feet manacled.

Blacked-out glasses were pushed over his eyes as he was forced into the back of a car and on to the floor. Then he was covered with a blanket.

"When I got to that place, they told me to strip and gave me a blue uniform. Then they gave me a black sack. They told me: 'This is your sack. You need to keep it with you. Any time someone comes to your cell, you must put it on your head.

"Any time they deliver the food, you must put it on your head. You must never see the soldiers' faces. You do not want to know what will happen if you take it off.' Sometimes I thought I would die in that place and no one would ever know," he added

He was detained as part of a psychological game to pressure his brother, Mohammad who was also arrested by Israeli forces, into talking.

The interrogators brought the brothers together briefly, apparently as a means of letting Mohammad know that Sameer would pay the price if he didn't talk, The Guardian said.

Mohammad told the paper that he was beaten during his initial interrogation at a regular prison and then moved to 1391.

"They kept me there in a solitary cell for about 67 days. During this period, they continued with the torture, but they used a different method. They did not let me sleep more than two hours a day. When I started to get drowsy, they woke me up by making noise or by throwing water on me. As a result of the torture, they were able to get me to admit to all kinds of offences," he told the Guardian.

'Blind Mole'

Raab Bader, a 38-year-old accountant and father of two, was quoted as saying he was held in the awful cell like a "blind mole".

He was pushed into a windowless cell, 6ft square. A fan high in the ceiling drives air into the cell, but Bader say the noise is deafening.

"The cell walls were painted black. I never saw the ceiling. When I looked up, I saw only darkness. Light no stronger than the power of a candle penetrated in a peculiar way from one side of the room," he said in an affidavit.

The bed was a thin, damp mattress on a concrete slab a few inches above the ground. The toilet was a bucket, emptied every few days. Water to the cell came out of a hole in the wall, controlled by the guard.

"On the ninth consecutive day in the stench-filled cell, one of the soldiers was supposed to come and take me out. He almost vomited and rushed out of the cell," Bader continued.

"I spent many days in that solitary confinement cell and in others like it, and hour after hour I would talk to myself and feel that I was going crazy, or find myself laughing to myself."

First Prisoners

According to the paper, the first prisoners at Facility 1391 were Lebanese, including Sheikh Abd al-Karim Obeid, a spiritual leader to Hizbollah, members of his families and supporters and Shiite leader Mustafa Dirani.

After his release, Dirani filed a lawsuit in the Israeli courts alleging that he was sodomized by his Israeli interrogators. The legal action names a "Major George" who ordered a soldier to rape him.

Other former prisoners at 1391 have described how they were stripped naked for interrogation, blindfolded and handcuffed, and a stick was pressed against their buttocks as they were threatened with rape.

Another Lebanese prisoner, Ahmed Ali Banjek, told the Guardian he was tortured at 1391 into confessing that he smuggled a surface-to-air missile into the Israeli-controlled zone of southern Lebanon. He said he was forced to sit on a stick until it penetrated his anus.

Why Secret Facility?

Manal Hazzan, a human rights lawyer who helped expose the prison's existence, told the British daily that the Israeli law does entitle authorities and the army to hide prisoners, questioning the need for a secret facility.

"Our main conclusion is that it exists to make torture possible - a particular kind of torture that creates progressive states of dread, dependency, debility," she said.

Unlike any other Israeli prison, the International Red Cross, lawyers and members of the Israeli parliament have been refused access, according to the paper.

The Israeli government sufficed to say that the prison is situated on a secret military base and used for "classified activities."

Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel's intelligence service Shin Bet, said such a facility should have no room in a country boasted as a democracy.

"I knew there was a facility not under the responsibility of the Shin Bet, but under the responsibility of the military. I didn't think then, and I don't think today, that such an institution should exist in a democracy," the daily quoted him as saying.

Zahava Gal-On, a leftwing MP, described 1391 as "one of the signs of totalitarian regimes and of the third world."

Dalia Kerstein, an Israeli human rights activist and director of the Center for the Defense of the Individual (HAMOKED), was horrified to find out there was such a facility.

"I was shocked to find out there is such a facility. I don't want the country I live in to have such a secret prison," she said, adding that they are seeking to close it.

"I've met five people from different cities across the West Bank, from different organizations, and they all describe the same methods of torture. They're not beating people but there is very strong psychological torture that results in people hallucinating or having breakdowns," she added to the paper.

Facility 1391 remained a secret for two decades or more because those delivered to its clutches could be made to disappear.