Israel Behind Barbed Wire

The prisoners call it Ansar 3, after the lockup in Lebanon where Israel held Palestinian guerrillas captured during the 1982 invasion. Like the original, Ansar 3, deep in the Negev Desert, is something of a prisoner-of-war camp, this time for veterans of the intifadeh (uprising), the sticks-and-stones insurrection against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, a rebellion that began last December and still sputters on. Most of the 2,483 men and boys detained at the Negev camp are in effect political prisoners, held without charge, trial or sentence. They make up half of the nearly 5,000 Palestinians jailed in connection with the intifadeh at nearly a dozen facilities in Israel and the occupied territories.

The number of detainees may keep swelling. Late last week Palestinian leaders called a three-day strike in the occupied territories that shut down virtually all business activity in the West Bank and Gaza. A young Arab was killed by Israeli gunfire and seven others were injured, as authorities broke up a series of West Bank demonstrations. Days earlier, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin had held a clandestine meeting with four Arab leaders from the Gaza Strip as part of his campaign to develop a dialogue with a budding local leadership. The idea, he said, was to "get a sense of what should be done now that the violence has calmed down."

But in its bid to quell the rebellion, Israel has resorted to a system of secret justice for alleged Palestinian activists, with little recourse for appeal. The cases carry a numbing similarity. Around midnight on Feb. 1, for example, there was a knock at the door of Ezzidine al Aryan's home in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The pharmacist and head of the city's Red Crescent (Arab Red Cross) was at prayer. Aryan, 51, was taken to Jneid prison, where he languished in a cell for nearly three months. One day a judge handed down an order for six months of "administrative detention," based on charges contained in a file marked SECRET. On May 4, Aryan was transferred to the Negev camp, known officially as Ketziot. Like most Ansar prisoners, Aryan is presumed to be an activist and a security threat.

Today Aryan is among 28 men who spend searing days and chilly nights in a tent at one of four 200-man compounds in Ansar's Camp B, which constitutes one-third of a canvas village that sprang up on the desert plain three miles from the border with Egypt. By day the men loll on wooden pallets that are cushioned by a layer of foam and a rough gray blanket. At night prisoners are required to retire to their tents, close down the side flaps of their dwellings by 9 p.m. and not come out until reveille at 5:30 the next morning.

Conditions are harsh but not inhumane. There is enough water for drinking, occasional showers and laundering each prisoner's army-issue shirt and pants. Everyone receives one bar of soap a month. The food is army rations -- filling but hardly appetizing. The primitive latrines reek; rats, scorpions and mosquitoes are ever on the prowl.