PROBE ISRAELI TORTURE CAMP

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Transcribed from the clipping

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL—At the request of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the Israeli government is investigating Arab reports of mis-treatment and torture allegedly inflicted on Arab infiltrators into Israel. The reports came from Jordan, and were supplemented by declarations from United Nations observers.

It was reported that the infiltrators, who were trying to find their way back to abandoned homes or were intent on smuggling or plunder, eventually were corraled in a detention camp east of Rehovoth. In this camp, according to Arab testimony, they were beaten up, deprived of sustaining food, and in some cases tortured.

United Nations photographers have pictures showing bloody hands from which nails had been torn, along with photographic evidence of broken bones and disfigurement. Complaints have been made by Arabs to the United Nations and by the U.

S. state department to Israel, which is investigating, but apparently has little control over the small border patrols that are constantly defending themselves against the refugees. Both U. N. personnel and Americans here are disturbed over what they regard as the Israeli government’s complacent attitude and its obvious lack of control over its own forces.

The charge is made that the Israelis selected more than 100 of the healthiest Arabs and ordered them out of the camp. They were taken blindfolded in trucks to the nearest border and then herded over, while machine-gun bursts separated them into groups, it was said. The area was barren, with no water or food.

Some of the Arabs wandered for days until they reached Amman, while others fell by the wayside.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead, page date line or page number is present in this clipping, so neither the 1950-06-10 date nor the publication (Des Moines Register) can be confirmed from the image. The credit line under the byline reads “Leased Wire from The N. Y. Times,” which identifies the source of the copy, not this paper.

Unusually, the dateline carries no date at all — it reads only “TEL AVIV, ISRAEL—”, where the New York Times version of the same despatch (u1950thenewyorktime) reads “TEL AVIV, Israel, June 8”. A June 8 despatch running on June 10 in Iowa is consistent, but nothing in the image establishes it.

Cite this clipping

"PROBE ISRAELI TORTURE CAMP," Des Moines Register, 10 June 1950. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1950-016. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1950-016