Britain Funds Palestinian Authority Human Rights Abuse

According to the JC, Britain has been training and supporting Abbas’s security services since 2011 at a cost of more than £65 million (appr. $7 million).

By United with Israel Staff

Palestinian thugs who beat and torture critics of PA President Mahmoud Abba’s regime are trained by the British army at taxpayer’s expense, The Jewish Chronicle (JC) has revealed.

According to the expose by JC journalist David Rose, published Thursday, 14 members of the PA’s Preventive Security Organization (PSO) were caught on CCTV abducting Palestinian human rights activist Nizar Banat in June 2021. Footage obtained by the JC shows the PSO pushing Banat into a car and later carrying him – only partially clothed – into their security headquarters.

In June, Banat, a Palestinian critic of the PA with over 300,000 followers, died after being arrested by Palestinian security services.

His cousin, Ammar Banat, said that around 25 Palestinian security forces stormed the home where Nizar was staying, blowing out doors and windows. They beat Nizar with an iron bar and sprayed pepper spray in his eyes before undressing him and dragging him away to a vehicle, Ammar told a local radio station, citing two other cousins who were present during the arrest.

The 44-year-old Banat, a father of five who worked as a carpenter, was taken to a Hebron hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

A statement issued at the time by the PA Governor of Hebron, Jibreen al-Bakri, said that a warrant had been issued for Banat’s arrest.

The PA crackdown on its critics continues. Just last weekend, Abbas’s terrorists arrested dozens of Palestinians. The immediate cause was reportedly the activists’ plan to demonstrate in Ramallah’s Manara Square Saturday for justice after the brutal murder of Banat.

Lacking an Israeli Angle

According to the JC report, Britain has been training and supporting Abbas’s security services since 2011 at a cost of more than £65 million (appr. $7 million). Palestinian human rights activists say Whitehall has chosed to overlook the systematic use of torture and widespread human rights abuse in the PA-administered areas of Judea and Samaria.

In fact, charges of human rights abuse and torture by the PA have been ongoing for many years. In December 2016, for example, Dr. Ammar Dwaik, director of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights, told the Palestinian Ma’an news agency that the organization had received 1,220 complaints of torture from detainees of Palestinian detention centers over the course of 2015.

Award-winning Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, based in Jerusalem, has also written extensively about the PA’s routine torture of its critics. According to one such column published by The Gatestone Institute, he notes that “human rights violations are regularly ignored by the international community when they are perpetrated by Palestinians against Palestinians and lack an anti-Israel angle.”

Bassam Tawil, a Palestinian scholar based in the Middle East, concurs, writing that the international community barely takes notice when Palestinians kill Palestinians, unless Israel is involved.

Trying to Escape to Israeli-controlled Area

Diala Ayesh, a human rights lawyer and friend of Banat, told the JC, “You [British] say you support human rights, but when I see the atrocities the PA is creating, I say you must stop paying your money. This isn’t just on my country. It’s on yours.”

Ayesh speaks from experience, having herself suffered beatings as well as sexual abuse by PA thugs.

Banat, the JC notes, had once been a member of the PA ruling party, Fatah. However, his brother said, he had come to believe “that before we can create a Palestinian state, we must cleanse ourselves.”

Banat’s abuse began the night after he wrote to the EU, asking it to stop funding the PA, which he said had become “undemocratic, corrupt and illegitimate.” Gunmen shot at his family home in Hebron, but he continued denouncing the PA on Arabic TV channels based outside of Judea and Samaria.

Although defiant, he took seriously the shooting incident, as well as many death threats, and moved several miles away, where security is controlled by Israel.

“Two days before his death, he called me and said, ‘I am running from the PA. They want to kill me’. I cry when I remember that. I thought he was exaggerating,” his lawyer told JC.