While Egypt is playing a key role in negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis over a possible prisoner exchange, the country has little to say about its own share of Palestinian prisoners, the number of which is unknown.
Most Palestinian political prisoners in Egypt are imprisoned either on charges related to terrorism in the neighboring Sinai Peninsula, or for smuggling from north Sinai into Gaza and Israel, a practice that is brought on by the blockade on Gaza.
Egypt’s incumbent emergency laws have been used to incarcerate Palestinians, who, according to human rights groups, are in many cases detained without trial and tortured in detention. With little information about their cases and little support from the Palestinian National Authority, their status is usually deferred to dark corners.
“Before Al-Aqsa Intifada on 18 September 2000, the Palestinian community here worked on identifying Palestinian prisoners in Egypt,” says Abdul Qadir Yassin, a Palestinian historian and community activist. These prisoners were found to have been detained for both political and non-political reasons. “Some of them have finished their prison terms and were not released and as a consequence, their Egyptian travel documents have expired,” Yassin adds. Palestinians living in Egypt have received travel documents with validity for anywhere from six months to five years, according to the year of arrival.
The situation of these prisoners prompted individuals from the Palestinian business community in Egypt to intervene and they managed to strike an agreement from Egyptian security authorities to release the detainees and issue them temporary travel documents. According to Yassin, no numbers were published.
A representative of the Palestinian community who was involved in the deal refused to release numbers or any further information, saying that part of the agreement with Egyptian state security was contingent on not involving the media.
The July 2007 Hamas coup in Gaza changed the situation of Palestinian prisoners in Egypt, according to Yassin. After the Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, the Islamist faction formed a cabinet and embarked on a series of contentious actions against its adversary Fatah. These resulted in Hamas’s taking over the Gaza strip.
The opening of the Gaza border in Rafah on 23 January, 2008 led to movement from both the Egyptian and Palestinian sides of the border, in a euphoric moment for people who had been virtually incarcerated on one side of the border. During this influx, many Palestinians were arrested on charges of illegally entering Egypt.
But the movement across the border was seen by Palestinian rights activists as a natural response to the sudden opening after the Rafah border crossing was closed completely by the Egyptian security in June 2007. The blockade was reinforced by Israel, who wanted to reprimand Gaza for rocket attacks originating there.
Tarek Fahmy, head of the Israeli Studies Unit at the National Center for Middle East Studies, maintains that Egypt only detains Palestinians who are accused of illegal acts. Egypt is not interested in arresting Hamas cadres to weaken the group’s control, which is a common concern among Palestinian activists, according to Fahmy.
“In Egypt, most Palestinians are detained because of issues that constitute a threat to the national security of the country. Egypt does not pursue people in Hamas randomly. All arrests are related to illegal actions in Egypt such as smuggling or money laundering,” Fahmy says.
Despite being the host and the guardian of Palestinian reconciliation talks between different factions, particularly Hamas and Fatah, Egypt recognizes Fatah as the Palestinian National Authority representative.
Fahmy puts Palestinian prisoners in Egypt in the past few years into two categories. “Egypt’s arrest policies generally target people involved in the tunnels trade and economy or more leading figures accused of threatening the country’s national security, such as Yussef Abu Zuhri.”
Abu Zuhri was the brother of Sami Abu Zuhri, a chief Hamas spokesperson. He was accused of possible connections to the Hizbullah cell case, in which Egyptian security forces arrested a group of Lebanese, Egyptian and Palestinian men for alleged associations with the Lebanese militia and plotting terrorist attacks in Egypt. Abu Zuhri died on 12 October, 2009 in prison at age 38. Hamas accused Egyptian security of torturing him to death and has threatened to take the case before the international arena.
Ahmad Noufal, another Palestinian Hamas cadre, has been imprisoned in Egypt since 2008. Dubbed the Palestinian Azzam, a reference to Azzam Azzam, the Israeli man who was detained and tried in Egypt in 1997 for spying for Israel, Noufal has always been mentioned by Hamas’ negotiators in Cairo. But his file has not been opened by the Egyptian authorities, according to Fahmy, who also sits in on reconciliation talks.
The other major group of Palestinian prisoners in Egypt is those charged with smuggling or money laundering activities. “People involved in the tunnels’ trade and economy are generally targeted in Egypt," says Fahmy. "There have been direct messages from Egypt to Hamas to stop smuggling activities since 2000 and to control the border area better.”
Smuggling of goods and arms is a flourishing underground economy between the Egyptian and the Palestinian towns of Rafah. This economy has boomed since the blockade on Gaza began in 2007. Smuggling the sole lifeline of goods to the besieged strip.
But Fahmy maintains that the arrests, detentions and trials of Palestinians do not spell out a particular Egyptian position toward Hamas. “Hamas enjoys the Egyptian respect. Its leaders come and go through Egypt and enjoy a diplomatic status.”
Khaled Ali, lawyer with the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, provided legal defense for Palestinian detainees in more than one case. In 2004, Palestinians living in Egypt were arrested on allegations of involvement in the terrorist attacks in Sinai’s Taba resorts. After the three simultaneous attacks killed about 34 people, Egypt arrested no fewer than 2400 people suspected of involvement in the case. Among those arrested were many Palestinians.
In 2009 the Hizbullah cell trial began. “The problem is that a lot of prisoners are held without trial, which is a common human rights violation in Egypt. The emergency law stipulates that there has to be an announcement of the accusations for which people are detained,” Ali says. “In the Hizbullah cell case, prisoners were detained in November 2008, but the case was not raised before April 2009.”
This delay, according to Ali, is key in extracting forced confessions from prisoners, who are “trained many times to face the prosecutor, so that when they face him for real, they would confess things they might not have done.” The three Palestinians Ali has been representing in court are accused of threatening national security, spying, carrying unlicensed arms and using the Egyptian territories to plot terrorist attacks.
“In both the Taba attacks case and the Hizbullah case, the arrested told us that they were tortured during the interrogations,” Ali adds.
According to sources, the Palestinian embassy does not consider Palestinian detainees in Egypt a priority. “The embassy could go as far as endorsing the Egyptian state’s decision to detain certain Palestinians because they are against the [Palestinian National] Authority,” says Yassin. “I don’t hear of the embassy supporting political or non-political prisoners, which is strange because I know that ambassadors around the world make sure that their prisoners are properly treated.”
Al-Masry Al-Youm contacted a senior official within the Palestinian embassy, who preferred to remain anonymous. “We don’t like to intrude in the issue of prisoners because this is an Egyptian matter primarily,” he said.
And so the issue, like the prisoners, remains in the dark. Fahmy says, “There are no clear numbers that we can look at and contemplate. There is no information available. The issue of Palestinian prisoners is not commonly brought up.”
