Palestinian aid worker remains in Israeli jail after six years and 167 court sessions

A senior Palestinian aid worker with the Christian charity World Vision remains in an Israeli prison after six years and 167 court sessions. Mohammed El-Halabi was placed under administrative detention in 2016 which allows the state to hold him with neither formal charge nor trial for an indefinite period. Israel’s treatment of El-Halabi has been slammed by the international community as “not worthy of a democratic state.”

In the latest court hearing held last week El-Halabi’s detention was extended for another three months, reported the Guardian. The court said that it would only issue the extension after checking that the lower court would be able to come to a verdict before the order expires in May, giving rise to the expectation that a verdict will be issued soon.

Read: Palestinian Authority calls on UN to help release ex-Gaza aid worker

A request by El-Halabi’s legal team to have him moved from prison to house arrest in Haifa was rejected by the court. This will be reconsidered if there is another delay in a judgement.

“There is no reason for the verdict to be taking this long, or for any of the delays and secretive procedures we have seen in the past six years,” one of Halabi’s lawyers, Maher Hanna, is reported as saying. “It is difficult for Israel to say its courts are fair in a case like this. The facts are very clear and the case should have been dropped a long time ago… but the Israelis need to find a face-saving way out since Mohammed refused a plea deal.”

Internal investigations by World Vision and the Australian government – one of the charity’s major funders – found no evidence that El-Halabi has done anything wrong or illegal. World Vision is said to have paid a staggering $7 million to hire a forensic auditing firm to investigate Israel’s false accusations against the NGO.

Read: Free Palestinian aid worker Mohammed El-Halabi

These investigations completely exonerated El-Halabi and even found that he had gone out of his way to distance the charity from Hamas. He is not a supporter of the Islamic movement, which Israel alleges was given World Vision funds by the aid worker.

Following El-Halabi’s arrest in 2016, World Vision suspended its Gaza operations, shutting down psychosocial programming for 40,000 children, as well as the provision of medical supplies and food relief.

“Mr El-Halabi’s arrest, interrogation and trial is not worthy of a democratic state,” said the UN, which demands either a fair trial or his unconditional release. “What is happening to Mr El-Halabi bears no relation to the trial standards we expect from democracies, and is part of a pattern where Israel uses secret evidence to detain hundreds of Palestinians indefinitely.”

Read: Administrative Detention