A Palestinian resident of Jerusalem is suing the Palestinian Authority and the commander of the Preventive Security Service, Jibril Rajoub, for NIS 10 million. In a suit filed at the Jerusalem District Court, he reveals a story of severe abuse.

Zohir Switi, represented by lawyer Nadav Haetzni, lived in the village of Dura in the past and worked as an art teacher in the city girls’ school A-Tur on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

He relates that he was abducted from his car by Rajoub’s men, who waited for him at the Dura-Fawar intersection in the southern Hebron hills area. At the time the place was under Israeli control.

He related that he was beaten by his interrogators who demanded that he confess to receiving an Israeli ID card in exchange for collaborating with Israel. When he would not admit it, he was taken by car to a desolate area near Dura and thrown into thorny bushes. He said that his interrogators stomped on him with their shoes, put cigarettes out on his face and legs, urinated into his mouth and inserted a bottle into his anus.

After that Switi was imprisoned for two days in a prison cell in Hebron and the torture continued: he was stripped and tied by his hands and neck with a rope tied to the ceiling. The interrogators extinguished burning cigarettes all over his body, stepped on his stomach, slammed his head against the wall and beat his genitals with sticks. He lost consciousness several times from the blows, but his interrogators poured cold water on him and continued to question him.

Haetzni argues that Switi became a broken man and suffered physical and emotional scars and that the Palestinian Authority must pay for the damages it caused him.

This article ran in Ma’ariv on February 26th, 2002

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