SILWAD, West Bank — High school student Hamza Hamad spent 10 months in an Israeli jail for alleged links to the Hamas group, but was never charged with a crime.
The 16-year-old is one of the youngest among thousands of Palestinians who have been held in so-called administrative detention in half a century of Israeli military occupation.
The teen’s case spotlights one of Israel’s perhaps most contested policies, under which it can hold suspects for months or sometimes several years without charges. Israel says the policy is a key tool in preventing attacks on civilians, but rights activists say it violates due process.
Numbers of detainees have fluctuated, from a few dozen to hundreds at any given time, with spikes during violent periods. Detainee figures are up again since October 2015, when Palestinians, mostly acting on their own, began stabbing or ramming cars into Israelis in a series of deadly attacks.
Israeli officials also indicated they would expand the use of administrative detentions to deter possible attacks inspired by the extremist Islamic State group. Israel’s security Cabinet approved the idea after a Palestinian, with purported sympathies for the group, rammed his truck into soldiers earlier this month, killing four.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared it to truck ramming attacks in Europe, which has seen some debate about administrative detentions as a means of countering a militant threat.
France and Britain used administrative detentions in conflicts in Algeria and Northern Ireland, but no longer permit it. Instead, they impose some controls on some suspects who have not been charged, including house arrest. The United States has held suspected militants without trial at its Guantanamo naval base in Cuba.
Rights activists say Israel’s practice stands out because it presently uses administrative detentions as part of an open-ended military occupation. Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem in 1967, but attempts have failed to negotiate the terms of a Palestinian state on occupied lands.
“These exceptional measures are still being used in a very routine way,” said Sari Bashi of the group Human Rights Watch.
“Military necessity can become greater during times of tension and escalation, but administrative detention needs to be an absolute last resort,” she said. “Israeli practice suggests that it is being abused.”
Israel says it needs a means of deterrence. It says more than 1,300 Israelis have been killed since the second Palestinian uprising began in 2000.
Administrative detention is only permitted if a trial could compromise intelligence sources, the Justice Ministry said. Judges monitor any extension of the initial term, usually six months, and detainees can appeal to the Supreme Court, the ministry said.
Lawyers say a proper defense is impossible because they and their clients can’t see the state’s purported evidence.
Hamad was first arrested in August 2015, at the age of 15, and held for 22 days at a Jerusalem compound where interrogators beat him and asked about weapons, said his mother, Worood.
Last February, a month after Hamad’s 16th birthday, Israeli soldiers seized him again from his home in the village of Silwad. He was taken to the nearby Ofer detention center. His four-month stretch in administrative detention was renewed twice before his release in December.
In an interview earlier this month, the teen said there had been “no reason” for his detention.
He said he was held in a cell with nine other minors, most of them not administrative detainees. The tedium of watching TV and walking in the yard was only interrupted by a weekly Arabic lesson.
Hamad said he’ll try to graduate this year, even though he lost two semesters in school, and was most passionate about tending to his horse, mule and two dozen chickens.
