Franco-Palestinian Salah Hamouri files complaint for torture during his incarceration in Israel

Franco-Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri filed a complaint in Paris on March 28 for arbitrary detention and torture, in order to denounce the conditions of his incarceration in Israel in 2022, AFP learned on Thursday April 4. In this complaint, his lawyers, William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth, assert that their client “was the subject of repeated arbitrary detentions and suffered acts of torture during these deprivations of liberty”.

They mention in the document, of which AFP was aware, different “arrests and detentions”between 2001 and 2018, but above all denounce his administrative detention “without official charge” between March and December 2022, before his expulsion to France. For them, various facts amount to torture, such as the conditions of his transfer in July 2022 to a new place of detention, with deprivation of food and sleep, “punitive isolation” following his hunger strike or the “prolonged restriction or even ban on contact with family”.

Arrested and imprisoned in 2005, Salah Hamouri was sentenced in 2008 to seven years in prison by an Israeli court having found him guilty of participating in a plan to assassinate Ovadia Yossef, former chief rabbi of Israel, at the origin of the ultra-orthodox Shass party. The Franco-Palestinian, who maintains his innocence in this affair, was released in 2011 as part of a prisoner exchange. His expulsion at the end of 2022 was judged “contrary to the law” by France and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had described it as “war crime”.