Roanoke Times · Roanoke, Virginia · 10 April 2018

CP-2018-003

Video shows threats, innuendo in questioning Palestinian girl

The protest icon’s family released an interrogation video from when Ahed Tamimi was 16 years old.

Karin Laub, Associated Press, Ramallah, West Bank

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Transcribed from the clipping

“RAMALLAH, West Bank — The family of prominent Palestinian protester Ahed Tamimi on Monday released excerpts from a video in which an Israeli interrogator threatens the then-16-year-old with the arrest of her relatives if she refuses to cooperate. The interrogator also comments on her body, fair skin and ‘eyes of an angel.’

The interrogator, identified as an agent of the Israeli military intelligence branch, at times moves within inches of the teenager, who doesn’t respond and repeatedly asserts her right to remain silent.

The Israeli military said a complaint of improper conduct on the part of the investigator, filed by Tamimi’s lawyer, has been handed to the Justice Ministry and is being ‘thoroughly examined.’ Ahed’s father, Bassem, told reporters that the video is evidence of Israel’s failure to break his daughter.

He portrayed Tamimi, who has become an icon to Palestinians, as a symbol of resistance to Israel’s 51-year-old military occupation. Her silence under pressure shows that ‘we are not victims, we are fighters for the cause of freedom of our people,’ he said.

A West Bank-based rights group said a majority of minors have reported being verbally abused, intimidated or humiliated in Israeli custody… Tamimi is serving an eight-month prison term — the result of a plea deal — for slapping and kicking two Israeli soldiers outside her West Bank home in mid-December… ‘When I think of my little sister, her eyes look like your eyes,’ he tells her.

‘She is white like you. In the sun, she looks like the hamburger. And what about you? What do you look like in the sun? Red, red, red? When I see your eyes, I say, it’s a shame [haram], you are here [in detention],’ he says.”

Context added by this archive

An American paper printing the transcript of what an Israeli interrogator said to a sixteen-year-old girl, and the military’s answer that the complaint is being “thoroughly examined.”

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