The Palestinian Authority claimed Saturday that Arafat Jaradat, the 30-year-old
Palestinian who died in Megiddo Prison last week, was killed by Palestinian
“collaborators.”
The PA Prisoners Affairs Ministry said that Jaradat died
two days after being transferred to a cell where “collaborators” were being
held.
According to the ministry, Jaradat was moved to the cell so that
the “collaborators” would be able to extract a confession from him after his
Israeli interrogators failed to do so.
“Because he did not confess to
throwing stones, Jaradat was moved to the collaborators’ cell in prison, where
he was physically liquidated two days later,” the ministry said.
In a
statement, the ministry claimed that Israel often uses “collaborators” in its
prisons to elicit confessions out of security prisoners.
“Occupation
courts and the [Israeli] security forces endorse the results of the
‘interrogations’ conducted by the collaborators without checking how confessions
are extracted,” the statement said.
The ministry reiterated its call for
the United Nations and international organizations to dispatch a commission of
inquiry to investigate Jaradat’s death and the alleged existence of
“collaborator cells” inside Israeli prisons.
Over the past week, the PA
leadership held Israel fully responsible for the death of Jaradat, a father of
two from the village of Sa’ir, near Hebron.
But this is the first time
the PA has claimed that Palestinians killed Jaradat.