Blocking Visits, Violating Confidentiality: Palestinians' Attorneys Are the Latest Target - Israel News - Haaretz.com
Prohibited from showing up for her job. There is no other way to describe the meaning of the document received by Palestinian lawyer Iman Awad. The commander of Ofer Prison signed it, Assistant Commissioner Vadim Goldstein, who had decided to deny her entry to the prison facility for a period of one month. But, she was only a secondary injured party in this story, as her Palestinian clients who were being held behind bars were prevented from having contact with their lawyer.
This was in November of last year, following a session at the adjacent Ofer Military Court, where Palestinians are tried under military law. There was a very unfriendly discussion between Goldstein and Awad. In its wake, she relates, he threatened to prevent her entry into the prison and the court. Three days went by, and the threat became a reality. The grounds: intelligence information according to which there was a reasonable basis to assume that she would transmit information among prisoners.
This story is just one example of the restrictions – or rather harassment – that the Prison Service has been applying to lawyers representing Palestinians since the beginning of the war in Gaza. The grounds cited by the Prison Service rely mainly on intelligence information, to which the lawyers have no access. In most instances, the Israel Prison Service claims that the lawyers try to transmit messages to prisoners or between prisoners. In at least some instances, the messages are no more than regards from their families.
- Malnutrition, illness and death: The routine for Palestinians at Israel's Megiddo prison
- Too many people are complicit in shameful treatment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons
- A Palestinian journalist detained for nine days faced beatings, humiliation and hunger
Ofer Prison in January.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
Along with that, lawyers are also complaining that guards listen in on the meetings with their clients, thereby violating confidentiality, allot insufficient amounts of time for their meetings, schedule visits at lengthy intervals and even demand to read their legal documents – including the statements they write during meetings with the prisoners. Some of these measures stem from Prison Service policy, whereby Palestinian prisoners should be cut off entirely from the world outside the prisons. Following October 7, there have been no family visits, and lawyers are in effect the only connection the prisoners have to the outside world.
This connection has become especially critical following the sharp decline in the conditions in which Palestinian prisoners are being held, due to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir's policy. Practically speaking, these visits are the only way to reveal what is now happening at the prisons.
In Awad's case, this is a twisting tale, which began at the court session for the extension of the remands of three Palestinian prisoners. Awad asked that their families be permitted into the courtroom, but Assistant Commissioner Goldstein objected. "I don't understand how it's possible to enable them to speak with their families when we have hostages in Gaza," he said. However, the court was not convinced, and it allowed them to enter. Goldstein added: "The lawyers here don't care about the harm to state security."
But that was not the end of the story. At the conclusion of the court session, Awad spoke with one of the prisoners in a video conference. "I told the prisoner that he had received another 10 days, that he should take care of himself, and 'bye,'" she told Haaretz. Goldstein also had something to say about that. According to her, he reproached her for the hand gestures she had made during the conversation and began to yell at her, "Those are terrorists," pointing a finger in her direction. The statement and the physical gesture led her to think he was talking about her. "You're the terrorists, not us," she said to him in response.
Assistant Commissioner Vadim Goldstein, the warden of Ofer Prison.Credit: Israel Prison Service/Facebook
In the wake of that statement, she noted, came the threat of preventing her entry into the prison and court and subsequently the decision to prohibit her entry to the prison for one month. After that, she was also summoned for investigation under caution on suspicion of having insulted a public servant and was released on condition of staying away from Goldstein for a period of 30 days.
After a petition was filed on her behalf by attorneys Michal Pomeranz and Riham Nassra, at the court's recommendation, the prison service agreed to shorten the prohibition of her entry until the day after the deliberation on the petition. Altogether, she was denied entry to the prison for 24 days.
This is not a matter of a new regulation or a law that came about with the start of the war, which enables these sanctions on lawyers. In the West Bank, the law allows a prison's commander to ban a person from the facility if he has a reasonable suspicion that the person will transmit information between prisoners, harm security in the area or impair discipline at the facility. As for prisons within Israeli territory, there is a similar law, which details the possibility of advancing the activity of a terrorist organization. The period of the ban is limited to 14 days, unless a district court orders otherwise, and can be up to six months.
However, before the war began, and certainly before Ben-Gvir became a minister, these bans were not frequently used. Now the rules of the game have changed. "The aim is to distance the prisoners from their families and their lawyers," Awad said. In her opinion, that is the point of the saga in her case, and probably not just hers. "You are punishing them in the prison – and then you continue to punish them, leaving them with nothing."
What intelligence?
Last May, the Prison Service spokesperson issued a press release headed "A Lawyer Suspected of Transmitting Messages to a Terrorist Was Detained for Security Interrogation." Added to the statement was a datum: Since the start of the war, 52 cases have been opened against lawyers who tried to pass messages to terrorists. The press release gathered quite a lot of momentum on social media, mainly thanks to a report by Ayala Hasson on Kan 11 television, according to which the press release was about a Jewish lawyer, who had been apprehended with documents and pictures in which he had "concealed messages, allegedly from relatives in Gaza."
Attorney Abeer BakerCredit: Daniel Rolider
And now for the lawyer's version: On May 4, he came to Ofer Prison for the first time in his life to visit a client of his, a Gazan medical doctor who was detained there. Upon his arrival, he received a page of instructions. After reading them, he turned to the guard who was there, showed her a picture of his client's children and asked if he was allowed to bring it into the visitation. According to him, she snatched the photo from his hand, grabbed confidential legal documents he was carrying and that he had no intention of bringing into the visitation, photographed them with her telephone and prevented his visit.
The documents, some written in English and some cited in the Kan 11 report, included various details; for example, that the prisoner's family had moved to Beit Lahia and that they were feeling well. The documents also included that Médecins Sans Frontières had extended his contract and was continuing to pay his salary, and that diplomatic pressure was being applied for his release.
Confiscation "of the documents" and cancellation of the visit did not suffice. The prison called in the police, and the lawyer was detained there for about an hour and a half, under the supervision of a guard, until the police came. When they arrived, they wrote down his details and released him. End of story? Not yet. Then, Ofer Prison chief Goldstein decided to deny him entry to the prison for six months because of "an attempt to pass messages and regards that have no connection to a professional meeting."
The lawyer decided to challenge the legality of this decision at the High Court of Justice, through attorney Abeer Baker. In the petition, Baker argued that the prison commander's conclusion that the intention to send regards to a client roused reasonable suspicion was far-fetched – and in any case that particular lawyer (the court issued an order prohibiting the publication of the lawyer's name, at his request) had not intended to breach the instructions. Moreover, the court noted that once the case was covered in the media, the lawyer received threats and his name was revealed on social media. In its reply to the petition, the state said that denial of the lawyer's entry had been canceled on the day the state submitted its response to the court – that is, in actuality, it had been in effect for only two months.
Attorney Ahmed ZahikaCredit: Olivier Fitoussi
Contrary to the lawyers' position, Supreme Court Justices Alex Stein, Gila Canfy-Steinitz and Chaled Kabub ruled that upon the cancellation of the prohibition of entry, the petition was rendered superfluous. Though the lawyers requested that the High Court of Justice rule that the decision had been invalid from the outset, the three justices ruled that the request to deliberate on the legality of the policy expanded the scope of the petition beyond what had been requested when it was submitted and refrained from making a decision in principle on the matter. They ruled that the Prison Service had to pay the Jewish lawyer's court expenses amounting to 10,000 shekels ($2,950).
"The Israel Prison Service decided to prevent lawyers from giving the prisoner an update on the condition of his family members, or from conveying greetings from them, to not harm its efforts to completely isolate the prisoners from the outside world," Baker told Haaretz. "Such isolation is torture and a cruel and prohibited method of punishment. In effect, lawyers are being asked to take part in the torture of prisoners, just as they do with doctors who authorize interrogation by torture. We must oppose this." She added that her professional position is that conveying greetings from the prisoners' parents and updating on their clients' conditions lies within lawyers' responsibilities.
Preventing entry to prisons is not the only restriction that the Prison Service applies to lawyers. "I came to visit Ganot Prison," attorney Ahmed Zahika said. "I waited two hours and then the guard told me – you have exactly three minutes for each prisoner." Zahika, who represents Palestinian prisoners and frequently visits prisons, also said that in meetings with his clients, the guards demonstrated their presence and listened to the conversations. At least once, they even intervened in the meeting. "A few months ago, a prisoner in Ganot Prison told me that there were prisoners in his room in very serious medical condition," Zahika said. "I wanted to help, so I told him to say their names, and then the guard stopped him. He said, 'You are not allowed to talk about anyone else, only about yourself.'"
When Zahika went for a routine visit to Ganot Prison last March, the guards informed him that he could not enter: "I asked the guard, 'Is there a decision [to block me]?' So, he told me there was nothing to talk about. I filed a complaint, and then they contacted me from the prison service and told me that I was not barred." To this day, he has not received an explanation as to why he was not allowed in that day.
Attorney Gheed KassemCredit: Gil Eliyahu
There are other ways guards interfere with the lawyers' visits with their clients, the lawyers said. According to some of them, guards do not allow clients to sign affidavits without first reading them. According to a complaint filed by lawyer Taghrid Shbeita last December, while she was in Megiddo Prison, she asked the guard to hand over the affidavit she had written to the prisoner so that he could sign it. Instead, the guard began to read it. She asked him to stop because it breached confidentiality, but he did not. "His response was that it was his duty, he had to be sure that I had not committed a crime against state security," she wrote in the complaint. The guard continued to insist that he would not allow the prisoner to sign the affidavit unless she allowed him to read it first.
Another lawyer, who asked to remain anonymous, said the Prison Service's stance might have repercussions on the most basic aspects of her job. "They are violating attorney-client privilege, they're reading everything I bring," she said. "You have a constant fear that they won't let you in, and the attitude is always hostile."
The same practice is used at other prisons, as indicated by attorney Gheed Kassem's experience. She first encountered this sort of restriction in March 2024. She arrived at Damon Prison to visit a Palestinian lawmaker, Khalida Jarrar. Upon arrival, the gate guards began going over the documents she brought. "Her nephew had just died, and we wanted to bring her a letter from her husband telling her to be strong," Kassem said, adding that the prison insisted on reading the entire letter, which she objected to. "The story began from there."
She said that at that point, the officer on duty told her that she could only take in documents in Hebrew and that any document in Arabic constituted a "transfer of information." To her displeasure, the visit was canceled, and the Prison Service filed a motion with the court to ban her entry to security prisons for six months. The prison authority's grounds were the same: transmitting information to prisoners. The case ended in a settlement: The ban was shortened to three months after a hearing at the Nazareth District Court, and the settlement received the force of a court decision.
After the sanction period expired, Kassem resumed visits to the prison, but not for long. In November 2024, it was decided to ban her entry again. This time, the reason was her visit made a month earlier to Gilboa Prison to meet Arab citizens of Israel who were serving sentences for incidents during Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021. Except for the date and the name of the prisoners, little was new about this case. Again, the guards insisted on reading the documents Kassem was carrying, including letters in Arabic that included the prisoners' names, information about them, subjects for clarification, salutations and words of encouragement from their families. What was different, she said, was that, this time, they also detained her and summoned the police. However, the notice of her entry ban was only received about a month later, she said, and she continued to visit prisons during the interim.
This time, she was familiar with what came next: a motion to the court to extend the ban on entering prisons for six months due to intelligence concerns. Copy-paste from the last time. The case, with Baker as her counsel, reached Nazareth District Court Judge Samir Khatib. He ruled that the intelligence on her was not significant. This time, too, the court proposed a settlement, banning her from entering prisons for just another month.
Like many of her colleagues, Kassem believes that this is a deliberate attempt to prevent lawyers from doing their job. "That is Ben-Gvir's policy," she said. "Orders from above to maximize the abuse of lawyers so they will regret choosing to work in this field."
The Israel Prison Service said in response: "During these months, the Prison Service has been dealing with incidents in which Israeli lawyers are transferring messages to security prisoners in a way that is liable to damage national security, the lives of the prison guards and public safety. Besides preventing their entry to the security prisons in coordination with the State Prosecutor's Office, the Prison Service notifies the Israel Police to open criminal cases against lawyers, and files complaints with the Israel Bar Association's Ethics Committee for disciplinary action. To date, about 40 Israeli lawyers have been dealt with in said manner."