UN ‘strongly protests’ Israel’s use of Palestine refugee school as detention centre

The main United Nations agency helping Palestine refugees has strongly protested Israel’s use of one of its schools as a detention and interrogation centre for hundreds of suspects, calling it “a flagrant violation of UN privileges and immunities.”

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said Israeli military forces broke into its girls’ school in Askar Refugee Camp in the West Bank on Tuesday. This was not the first such abuse of the agency's humanitarian installations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with at least 10 schools having previously been occupied.

“In all these cases, the Agency has also protested to the Israeli authorities, but without result, as the most recent violation reflects,” it added.

“It is unacceptable that the Israeli Army persists in using UNRWA installations for rounding up and interrogating Palestinians despite our repeated calls on them to cease this practice,” the agency’s Director of Operations in the West Bank, Anders Fange, said. “All the explanations given by the Israeli military as to why they use UNRWA installations for these purposes disregard the fact that they violate international legal norms.”

In a related development, the New York-based Bureau of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People has expressed “grave concern at the systematic violation of the rights of Palestinian prisoners” in Israeli prisons, where over 3,000 detainees, including hundreds of ailing prisoners, are now on hunger strike.

“The prisoners are routinely subjected to inhumane conditions of incarceration, including arbitrary and indiscriminate beatings, humiliating strip searches, solitary confinement for excessive periods of time, and severe restrictions on family visits,” it said in a statement. “The Bureau is particularly distressed by reports of continued use of torture and other forms of ill-treatment of the detainees.”

Noting that it had repeatedly called upon Israel to abide by its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Agency called urged the government to heed the strikers’ demands and “ensure that the detainees, including women and children, are treated in a humane manner, that proper detention conditions are immediately established and basic human rights restored.”

More than 7,000 Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, have been detained by Israeli army or police for political reasons, including well over 300 child detainees and over 100 women, the bureau said.