Israeli state and administrative detention

Sir, – Your news report implies that the Israeli state’s controversial practice of administrative detention – a system of internment on unspecified charges, and under secret evidence, with subsequent six-month terms to be imposed without judicial accountability – applies only to “terror suspects” (“Israeli defence minister orders administrative arrests for four Jewish settlers”, World, June 28th).

In fact, administrative detention is widely used to imprison Palestinian activists who have never been implicated in any internationally recognisable criminal offence. Time magazine reported some years ago that only 5 per cent of Palestinians held in administrative detention are charged at the conclusion of their internment. The vast majority are released without charge.

Amnesty International has long raised awareness that many Palestinian activists are interned as “prisoners of conscience held solely for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association, to punish them for their views and activism”. In recent years, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) observed that 13 Palestinian journalists were being imprisoned under administrative detention.

The Israeli state currently imprisons over 1,000 Palestinians under this system of internment; the highest number in several decades. – Yours, etc,