Attacking a human rights organisation is a brazen attempt to hide the brutal reality of the occupation, writes Richard Pratt

The Palestinian human rights organisation Addameer has been subjected to an overnight raid by Israeli forces, seizing 5 computers as well as numerous hard discs and books.

Addameer is a non-governmental organisation that works tirelessly to provide legal support for Palestinians imprisoned by the Israeli occupation.

This isn’t the first time the organisation has had its Ramallah office invaded, with previous attacks having been carried out in 2002 and 2012. 

Ramallah is one of very few areas of the occupied West Bank that, on paper, is not under the control of the the Israeli state. Yet the disastrous arrangements laid out in the Olso Accords, now over quarter of a century old, mean that Palestinians have no power to prevent such attacks.

Currently, Israel is holding 5000 political prisoners. These prisoners are not citizens of the country that has incarcerated them, nor would they be entitled to be as this would threaten the apartheid state’s carefully engineered ethnic majority. 

Of those Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, 500 are being held (indefinitely) in administrative detention. In other words, they have been incarcerated without trial or charge. 

200 are children. 

The NGO’s legal unit coordinator, Ayman Nasser, has been held in administrative detention since last September.

For those lucky enough to have been treated to trial, this will have been carried out in a military court in a foreign language and without a lawyer or contact with their family.  

Israel’s reliance on administrative detention and torture, including of children, is in flagrant violation of international law. Addameer’s extensive documentation of these crimes, and the vital support they provide for its victims, has made it a clear target for ‘the Middle East’s only democracy’.