This article was originally published by the Palestine Times and is republished with permission.

An Israeli soldier stops Palestinians at a military checkpoint in the occupied West Bank. (Maan Images)

"Ahmed" is a sophomore at al-Quds University. Nearly eight months ago, he was arrested by the Israeli army and subjected to "harsh physical and psychological torture" at the hands of Israel’s Shin Bet interrogators at the Russian Compound Detention Center in Jerusalem.

The main charge leveled against him was related to his affiliation with an Islamic student bloc and participation in Quranic recitations sessions. Ahmed says Shin Bet operatives performed on him “all sorts of abuse,” including beatings, painful binding, back bending, sleep deprivation and even sexual threats.

“Their goal is always the same, to dehumanize and demoralize us, and to break our humanity and violate our dignity,” he says during an interview with Palestine Times.

Ahmed, who was last week released from Israeli custody, doesn’t deny that he voted for the Islamic bloc and that he was a committed and practicing Muslim. He also readily admits having participated in Quranic memorization sessions.

“I am a Muslim and I should be free to exercise my conscience and freedom of thought. Practicing one’s religion is not a crime after all. The Israeli state has no right to punish and persecute us for our thoughts. Arresting people for practicing their religion is incompatible with the laws of God and man alike.”

Ahmed’s story epitomizes the increasingly harsh treatment meted out to Palestinian detainees by the Shin Bet, which effectively controls all aspects of Palestinian life, thanks to a large net of informers and collaborators who report to their Israel handlers on everything occurring in their surroundings, he asserted.

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Prior to the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, the al-Aqsa Uprising in 2000, the Israeli High Court issued a landmark ruling banning the use of physical torture against Palestinian political and resistance prisoners. The court also ruled that “upholding the dignity of an individual” applied to Palestinian “security detainees.”

However, the court left a vague loophole when it allowed Shin Bet interrogators to exercise “moderate physical pressure” and “a degree of discomfort” on detainees especially in so-called “ticking bomb situations,” an allusion to preventing the occurrence of an impending acts of violence or resistance against Israeli civilian or military targets.

The court never really clarified in concise terms what does and doesn’t constitute a “ticking-bomb situation” and “moderate physical pressure” nor did it determine the exact boundaries between “moderate pressure” and torture.

The vagueness, say human rights groups and Palestinians, was as deliberate as it was tendentious, in order to strike a balance between security considerations and human rights.

In other words, the court suggested that security considerations overruled and overweighed human rights considerations and that the final say in this regard always belonged to the interrogators-torturers themselves and their bosses.

It is for this reason the Israeli judicial system, including the Israeli High Court, have refused to give hearing to hundreds of petitions by Palestinian detainees demanding putting an end to torture against them.

Needless to say, this acquiescence, if not complicity, by the Israeli justice system seemed to have given the Shin Beth a virtual carte blanch to abuse Palestinian detainees.

For example, a few months ago, a Shin Bet interrogator hit a Palestinian detainee from the village of Khursa, near Dura, on his face, smashing his front teeth, according to his wife. A number of similar cases were also reported by detainees from the northern parts of the West Bank.

A report issued by the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B’TSELSM) and the Center for the Defense of the Individual (HaMoked) yesterday assured that the Shin Bet, is still using different illegal methods against Palestinian detainees.

The report called these techniques "physical pressure and torture." The report, based on testimonies of 73 Palestinian detainees arrested between July 2005 and March 2006, showed that the Shin Bet uses beating, which varies in its severity depending on the case at hand, prolonged painful positioning known as Shabh and sleep deprivation.

Furthermore, the report identified seven main methods which it said were aimed at breaking the detainee’s spirits and makes him collapse. These included isolation from the outside world – including from lawyers and the Red Cross – for a prolonged periods, psychological and physical pressure, solitary confinement, lack of exercise, sleep and food deprivation, shackling inmates to their chairs, swearing and insults, nude searches, threats of torture and arrest of family members and using Asafir or prisoner informers to extract confessions from the detainees.

Recently released detainees have revealed that the quality and quantity of torture have worsened considerably since the Olmert government came to power last year.

A prisoner from Hebron who was released from the Ofer detention center last month said Shin Bet interrogators were increasingly resorting to “cursing religious symbols” such as the “Quran, God and the Prophet Muhammed,” ostensibly for the purpose of humiliating and psychologically tormenting detainees, especially those who happened to be religious.

Moreover, the Shin Bet has reportedly resorted to two especially sinister methods aimed at keeping the detainees in psychological instability.

These include extending a detainee’s administrative imprisonment (open-ended incarceration with out charge or trial) as a reprisal for not confessing to the charges, and introducing concocted charges based on confessions stealthily obtained from other inmates who may be totally unfamiliar to the detainee.

Shin Bet has declined to comment to the charges.