Said Kozali, Amos Zuaretz and Hadi Hatib, IDF officers who served in South Lebanon, never imagined that documents they signed would be submitted to the [Israeli] Supreme Court as evidence. They certainly never dreamed that these documents would be used to back up claims for the release of Lebanese detainees who are held without trial in Khiam prison. They served in the facilitating unit for South Lebanon, and never laid a foot in the prison near Marj Ayoun.
Documents signed by them were indeed submitted last week to the Supreme Court, and the lawyers who submitted them believe that they can have a significant influence on the decision of the judges, who will be requested to order the release of the detainees. They argue that these documents undermine the key Israeli claim about Khiam, which is that it has nothing to do with what goes on in the prison, as there is no Israeli "effective control" of the area. Only the SLA has this control.
The documents signed by the three officers are licenses that the IDF gave South Lebanese citizens to travel to Beirut, and allegedly prove that the IDF is in control of the northern border of the security zone. "The fact that the IDF controls the crossing points between South Lebanon and North Lebanon", says attorney Dan Yakir of the Association for Civil Rights, "establishes that it has effective control of South Lebanon. Whoever controls the northern and southern border of an area, is in control of that area." According to Yakir, this is the first time that such licenses are exposed.
They have made a long way, from South Lebanon via Beirut and New York, until they ended up in the Supreme Court file in Jerusalem. Two of them were granted by Kozali, of the civil administration in Hazbia, on June 26th 1990. Mustafa Hashem, a 16 year old from the village of Shif, and Hana Hashem, his 23 year old sister, were permitted to go to Beirut via the crossing point near the village of Niv. Four years later, Zuaretz granted a similar license to Bassama Dala, a 26-year-old resident of the village of Sabah.
Dala and the Hashem family members, who never returned to South Lebanon, kept the Israeli certificates. Three months ago they pulled them out of the drawer. It happened when Hanni Majali, director of the middle eastern section of Human Rights Watch, arrived at Beirut to collect information about South Lebanon. He interviewed Dala and the Hashems and took with him photocopies of the IDF documents. Later he transferred them to attorneys Tamar Pelleg-Sryck and Dan Yakir, who submitted them to the Supreme Court. Virginia Sherry, Majali's deputy, brought with her a fourth license. Hadi Hatib, of the South Lebanon liaison unit in Taibeh area, produced it about a year ago for a Lebanese woman.
The documents were submitted to the Supreme Court in the context of a petition of 5 Lebanese who have been detained in Khiam for many years without any kind of legal process. They are asking the court to order their release, or at least to instruct the IDF to allow their attorneys to visit them. The state attorney requests to reject the petitions, claiming that Khiam is run by the SLA, without any involvement of the IDF or other Israelis.
Riad Kalakish is the one who has been detained for the longest time among the five. He has been in Khiam for more than 13 years. He is a resident of the village of Dibin, 33 years old, arrested on Feb 17 1986 by an IDF force in the village of Shakara, where he was visiting his wife's parents. Pelleg-Sryck and Yakir wrote in the petition that he is "suffering from disorders in his nervous and digestive systems". The oldest they are representing is Adel Kalakish, Riad's brother. He is 37 and was arrested in Dibin six years ago.
The youngest, is Ziad Ghanawi of the village of Hula. When he was arrested, on March 15 1994, he was a 17 year old student in the high school in his village. Ghnawi is visited every three months by his family. These visits, started in 1995, were stopped in Oct 1997 after the unsuccessful [Israeli] commando operation, and renewed in August 1998 after an agreement was reached with Hizbollah regarding the return of the body of [the Israeli soldier] Itamar Ilia in exchange for the release of dozens of detainees from Khiam.
The two other petitioners are Mohammed Haris of the village of Aita-A-Shaab who has been in Khiam for two years, and Isam Awada, the owner of a bakery in Nakura. Awada was arrested five years ago and the attorneys mention in their petition that he is suffering from "problems in his kidneys and his back". Not one of the five was ever put to trial. If administrative arrest warrants were ever issued for them, nobody informed them of it. Nobody ever told them why they were arrested, who decided about their arrests, or who, and when, will decide on their release.
Torture with electricity
A Lebanese organization who acts from Beirut for the release of the detainees from Khiam, asked a few French lawyers to represent the five. These lawyers - Helene Gacon, Simon Foreman, Daniel Cohen and Denys Robiliard - addressed governments
and organizations around the world and asked attorney Pelleg-Sryck from the "Hamoked - Center for the Defense of the Individual" "to represent the five before the Israeli authorities".
Her first step was to request permission to visit her clients. In three letters to the attorney general of the IDF, Uri Shoham, she reminded that they have discussed the issue in the past, in connection with another client of hers. "As you may remember", she wrote, "the Red Cross agreed to drive me there if my visit has the permission of the Israeli authorities". This reminder was intended to hint that the Red Cross also believes that the "Israeli authorities", and not necessarily the SLA, are the authority regarding visits to the prison.
The military attorneys remained unimpressed by the hint and did not change position. Two of the letters were replied by Joseph Telraz, the deputy attorney general, and one by Shoham. In all cases the answer was the same: "we have no authority to interfere with what goes on in the prison. We have transferred your request to the relevant authorities, who will be able to inform the SLA of it". The SLA's reply is yet to arrive.
Pelleg-Sryck decided to file a petition with the Supreme Court. The petition she submitted, together with attorney Dan Yakir from ACRI, joins an earlier petition that they have submitted over six months ago on behalf of another Khiam detainee and which is still pending in the Supreme Court. Justice Itzhak Zamir scheduled both petitions to be heard together on December 14th.
Suliman Ramadan, the petitioner in the first petition, has been imprisoned in Khiam since 1985. Also without trial. The military force that arrested him included IDF and SLA men. The petition says that during his arrest his leg was injured and in Khiam, where he was brought for questioning, he was tortured "with electricity, beating and hanging". Following the injury, which was worsened by torture, the doctors who examined him, decided that his leg must be amputated. The petition says that the amputation was performed in an Israeli hospital, and after 12 days there Ramadan returned, to Khiam. In the 14 years that have passed nobody told him what he was accused for how long he will remain there. The goal of Pelleg-Sryck and Yakir is to prove that the IDF is the one in control of South Lebanon. They claim that if the court accepts this, it will be obliged to interfere in what is taking place in Khiam. In their petition they refer the judges to dozens of documents  - decisions of the Israeli government, statements by ministers, reports of international organizations, books and articles - that prove, as they say, Israel's control of the South Lebanon. For example, they quote an article by Yossi Peled who was the commander of the IDF northern front in the years when the security zone was established. In the article' printed in the book titled "The background of Israeli presence in the security zone", published by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem Peled describes how Israel built civilian infrastructure in South Lebanon." We invested a lot of money in the civilian infrastructure in the security zone, we built roads, schools, a water system, a telephone net, we supplied jobs, for the inhabitants of the region and organized summer camps for the children". All these, the petitioners claim, are elements of "effective control". They also draw the judge's attention to the fact that Peled often uses the expression "the IDF control of then security zone". In the same context they quote a decision taken in April 1998 when the previous government accepted the Security Council resolution 425. It said: "the Israeli government calls on the Lebanese government to begin negotiations for the restitution of the Lebanese government's control of the areas currently under the control of the IDF.

Who pays the wardens?
The state responded in an affidavit signed by General Dan Halutz of the IDF headquarters. His main claim, that "Israel does not have an effective control of the South Lebanon" was based on the argument the Israel has never established a military administration and never took the role of a sovereign regarding the powers exercised by one. "The nature of IDF presence in the security zone is completely different from its presence in the West Bank and Gaza before 1995, where it maintained permanent military presence in the heart of Palestinian population, as part and parcel of its control of the region".   The IDF is the smallest of the three military forces operation in the South Lebanon, writes Halutz. The number of its soldiers there is smaller than the UNIFIL troops (4,400) and the SLA (2,500) "For several years now, he writes, " IDF forces rarely patrol villages in the security zone and are not involved in the activity aimed to restrict the movement of the Lebanese residents.   The patrolling is being done almost exclusively by the SLA".
The SLA - he explains - is not subordinate to the IDF. As a prove he quotes the SLA commander Antoine Lahad, saying that he was the only responsible for the decision to withdraw from Jezzine enclave. Israel, Halutz claims, does not run Khiam and bears no responsibility for what is happening in it. The fact that detainees were released from it in exchange for the remains of IDF soldiers testifies, according to him, only to the "cooperation between the SLA and the IDF, and the SLA's understanding of the importance of the deal to the Israeli side".
  Halutz writes further, that Khiam facility is administered, maintained and guarded by the Lebanese who serve in SLA. The interrogators are also members of the SLA. However, he admits that that "there is a connection between the [Israeli] General security Service and the SLA concerning the collection of intelligence information and interrogations aimed to prevent terrorist acts in the region" and in the frame work of this connection GSS men cooperate with SLA men and assist them with professional guidance and training, but they do not participate in the interrogation of the detainees. Nevertheless Halutz admits that GSS men do visit Khiam. "I was told" - he writes- that that GSS held several meeting per year with SLA interrogators in Khiam.  As well information proceeding from interrogations is passed over to the Israeli security agencies. Also, some detainees were polygraph tested by the Israelis in the framework of the cooperation between the two sides. This cooperation, which results from the common goal to fight groups that constantly endanger the safety of the IDF soldiers and the north of Israel, has no bearing on the administration and control of Khiam facility".
The petitioners claim that this control is obvious from another fact that had been presented by them to the court and later confirmed by Halutz. SLA wardens and interrogators in Khiam  receive their salaries from Israel and the salaries are paid to them directly by an Israeli officer who visits the jail.  After having checked the matter, Halutz writes in the affidavit, this claim turned out to be true. " As a consequence, it was decided to stop the direct payment of the salaries to the SLA men who serve in Khiam, and this will be so beginning with the next salary".