According to a recent report by David Rose in The Jewish Chronicle: Palestinian thugs who beat a leading critic of Mahmoud Abbas’s regime to death were members of a security force trained by the British Army at taxpayer’s expense, a JC investigation has revealed.
Fourteen members of the Palestinian Authority’s Preventive Security Organization (PSO) were caught on CCTV kidnapping human rights campaigner Nizar Banat in June 2021, in footage obtained in full by the JC.
The aspiring politician was targeted after he highlighted the corruption of the Palestinian leadership on Facebook and other platforms. The footage shows them bundling him into a car and later carrying his partly-clothed body into their security headquarters.
Britain has been training and supporting Abbas’s security services since 2011 at a cost of more than £65 million to the taxpayer, raising serious questions about Whitehall’s judgment.
Palestinian activists have accused the UK of turning a blind eye to the systematic use of torture and widespread human rights abuse on the West Bank.
Diala Ayesh, a human rights lawyer and friend of the victim — who has herself been beaten and sexually abused by PA thugs — said:
“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”.
The JC investigation — the first of a series marking the upcoming 30th anniversary of the first Oslo Accord that led to the establishment of the PA —reveals that torture by British-backed forces remains routine on the West Bank.
Ayesh speaks from experience, having herself suffered beatings as well as sexual abuse by PA thugs.
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.
