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.