Transparency & Accountability
PA military court holds Banat trial five years without verdict
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Newsdesk gathers reporting from wire services and primary sources and rewrites every story in-house before publication. How our journalism is made →
The trial of 14 members of the Palestinian Authority's Preventive Security over the death of the activist Nizar Banat has run for almost five years without a verdict, according to the Palestinian monitoring group Lawyers for Justice, which has observed the hearings since they opened.
In a statement marking the fourth anniversary of the killing, the group said the proceedings have remained stagnant since sessions began in September 2021, with unjustified delays and serious doubts about the seriousness of the process, particularly after the defendants were released within a year of the crime, in what it called a clear violation of judicial norms and military court protocols for major crimes.
The case reached court quickly. The Palestinian news site Felesteen reported in September 2021 that the military prosecution had concluded its investigation in case number 2021/1 and decided to charge all 14 officers and personnel of the force that carried out the arrest. Al Arabiya reported the same month that the officers would face trial.
Hearings began on 7 September 2021, and were still under way when Lawyers for Justice issued a public statement noting a further hearing on 17 November 2024, which was again postponed.
The early sessions produced evidence in open court.
TRT Arabi reported in October 2021 that the military court in Ramallah continued hearing witnesses in the trial of 14 servicemen accused of causing Banat's death, that the military prosecution presented four police witnesses, and that exhibits were entered including a crowbar, a hammer, a flashlight, the record of the vehicle seizure, the clothes Banat was wearing, two pistols carried by the team that went to his house, and a report on the inspection of the victim's home.
The accused were brought to that session in military uniform.
Erem News, quoting the lawyer acting for the family, reported testimony that the Hebron operations director had told the court Banat was placed at the top of an arrest target list, and disclosed that his WhatsApp account had been penetrated and his conversations recorded — a step the military prosecution described as an unlawful procedure.
The family's legal team said it would ask the prosecution to seek further clarification from witnesses, either to amend the charges or add defendants.
Then the defendants went free.
Al-Araby al-Jadeed reported on 6 September 2022 that the 14 accused appeared before the special military court in al-Bireh at liberty for the first time, and that its correspondent watched them leave with the rest of those present at the end of the session, without being taken to the adjacent holding room as in earlier sessions.
Al Jazeera Arabic reported that the release had been granted a year earlier on grounds of a coronavirus outbreak, with the trial to continue while the accused were free, and that it was done without the knowledge of the family or the defence team, raising doubts about the seriousness of the proceedings.
Al Jazeera also reported that the sessions were followed by Palestinian and international rights organisations and by representatives of the European Union and the United Nations, and that the family and its prosecuting lawyer described repeated stalling.
Sessions have continued to produce disputes over expert evidence rather than findings. Lawyers for Justice, describing a hearing on 29 January 2023 before the special military court in Ramallah, said the military prosecution objected to a medical expert's report on the grounds that it was a desk report not based on examination or autopsy, and that the court added the report to the case file.
CNN reported in December 2022 that the family filed a case against the Palestinian Authority at the International Criminal Court.
Al Jazeera Arabic noted the constraint that follows: under the rules governing the international court, where a state takes proceedings against its own officers the court's role is complementary rather than primary, meaning it will not examine the case until the domestic proceedings are decided.
The unfinished trial in Ramallah therefore holds the file in place.
Beyond the Banat case, the published record thins out.
Lawyers for Justice said that since the killing it has documented hundreds of cases of arbitrary arrest, torture and ill-treatment against activists and political dissidents, and that 22 citizens and six security personnel have been killed since 7 October 2023, with no accountability for most of these crimes except where indictments were filed against political activists for the killing of security personnel.
Amnesty International's most recent country entry on the State of Palestine reports that the Independent Commission for Human Rights, the Palestinian national human rights institution, received at least 378 complaints of arbitrary detention by Palestinian security services, and that it received 61 complaints of torture and other ill-treatment in Palestinian detention centres and prisons in the West Bank, mostly during interrogations.
Neither figure is a count of deaths in custody, and no such count appears in that entry.
For Gaza the record is largely absent. Amnesty states that the destruction of the justice and law enforcement systems there meant the commission could not collect complaints of arbitrary detention or of torture and other ill-treatment by Palestinian authorities.
Amnesty separately reports that on 11 June, Hamas news channels and independent eyewitnesses who filmed the scene said gunmen affiliated with Sahim, a militarised unit established by Hamas, abducted, tortured and killed 12 Palestinians accused of working with the US-Israeli run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and that on 13 October gunmen affiliated with the Qassam Brigades announced they had extrajudicially executed eight men from the Dughmush family in Gaza City.
No investigation, charge or judgment in any of those cases appears in the material.
No date for the next hearing in the Banat case has been published in the accounts issued by the group monitoring it, and no judgment has been announced.
The demands Lawyers for Justice set out on the fourth anniversary — a fair and credible trial within a reasonable timeframe, prosecution of those responsible for the deaths of the 22 citizens, and rejection of selective justice — remain, on the published record, unanswered.
