Salah Hamouri (; born 25 April 1985) is a French-Palestinian lawyer and field researcher for the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. His wife – who is French – has been barred since January 2016 from entering Israel or the Israeli-occupied West Bank to visit him.
Hamouri was arrested in 2005 and accused of plotting to murder Ovadia Yosef, founder of Israel's ultra-Orthodox Shas party and former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel. After over 3 years' detention without trial, on the advice of his lawyer, while protesting his innocence he admitted culpability in a plea bargain in order to avoid a 14-year term of imprisonment, and was sentenced by a military tribunal to serve a 7 in jail. A number of committees have formed to protest against his treatment and affirm his innocence. Hamouri was released in exchange for the return of the Israeli POW Gilad Shalit in December 2011.
He has been repeatedly placed under a regime of administrative detention – which Amnesty International described as "a major human rights violation" It has been claimed that he has been held in detention for a crime of opinion.
Biography
Early life and education Salah Hamouri, is a native Jerusalemite, resident in the one neighbourhood, Dahyat el-Barid, of Al-Ram enclosed within Israel's Jerusalem municipal boundaries. He was one of three children—a brother, Amir, and a sister, Caroline—born to a French mother, Denise-Annick Hamouri, , from Bourg-en-Bresse, who teaches French at a private Catholic school in West Jerusalem, and a Palestinian father, Hassan Hamouri, who manages a restaurant in East Jerusalem. He is trilingual in Arabic, Hebrew and French, and has dual nationality, Palestinian and French, with French citizenship and an Israeli identity card.
An alumnus of the Catholic private school of Frères de Lasalle de Jérusalem in East Jerusalem, after his baccalaureate he enrolled in sociology at Bethlehem University, and subsequently studied law and qualified as a lawyer.
Early arrests and accusations In the early months of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Hamouri was shot in the thigh with live ammunition during a confrontation between Israeli troops and demonstrators at Al-Ram in northern Jerusalem. The bullet remained lodged there.
He was first arrested and placed under administrative detention when he was 16 years old, in 2001. He was caught handing out leaflets protesting Israeli "colonization," and was sentenced to five months in jail for "anti-Israeli propaganda" or/and for being a member of a student union (syndicat des étudiants). On his release he resumed his studies at the lyceum, and graduated in June 2003.
At 19, he was again arrested by the Shin Bet in 2004, and from February of that year served another five-month term in prison, without trial, on suspicion of being a member of George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Palestinian Marxist group regarded internationally as a terrorist organization. Hamouri has denied being a member of that organization, though he defends the movement as an integral member of the PLO and sympathises with its aims.
Alleged involvement in a plot against Ovadia Yosef In September 2005 Moussa Darwish (22) from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Isawiya, who had joined the PFLP in 2000, confessed that he had planned to assassinate Ovadia Yosef, the head of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party. Darwish, after entering a plea bargain agreement, was sentenced to a 12-year prison term in mid-December of that year. Darwish had been employed by a grocery near Ovadia's house, and had made deliveries to his residence in Har Nof, something that afforded him the opportunity to case the property and familiarize himself with its security arrangements. He developed a plan, and suggested to another PFLP member that they kill Ovadia by shooting him while driving by on a motorbike. The two accomplices were believed to have visited Givat Shaul in December 2004 to prepare their attempt, but the plan was foiled the following month when a scheduled consignment of ammunition from a third party at the Shuafat checkpoint was blocked by the presence of IDF soldiers which made the proposed transfer too risky. In delivering their judgment the court stated that Darwish's plot, if executed, would have jeopardized the security of Israel by instigating revenge attacks against Arabs in Jerusalem.
The foiling of such a plot had been cleared for publication several months earlier in April 2005, a month after Hamouri's own arrest. It was reported then that, in addition to Darwish, Hamouri, then 19, and Moatsam (var. Muatztaf) Sheikh (25) from 'Anata, were involved. Security sources were reported as asserting that Hamouri together with a friend, having purchased arms, had driven past Ovadia's home in January 2005 in order to case it; that PFLP inmates incarcerated in Jericho on suspicion of being involved in the murder of Rehavam Ze'evi several years earlier had mulled the idea of selecting Ovadia as a target and this had filtered through to Hamouri during his detention. Other sources state that Darwish came up with the idea.
Hamouri was arrested on 13 March 2005 at the Qalqilya checkpoint while he was driving home to Ramallah. He was ordered to get out of his vehicle by soldiers, blindfolded and handcuffed, and arrested without explanation before being sent for detention in Jerusalem's Moscovia Detention Centre where he was held incommunicado under administrative detention for three months. Two hours later Israeli agents ransacked his parents' home in East Jerusalem, seizing his computer's hard disk, and even dismantling the toilet in search of evidence. His parents only learned of the charges laid against him from the newspapers a month later, where it was written that he had driven past Ovadia's home in January after having purchased arms.
Hamouri was kept in administrative detention for three years and eventually shifted to Gilboa prison near the Syrian border, where he learnt Hebrew in order to pursue courses given to prisoners there. No more than two books – one of which had to be of a religious nature – were allowed to detainees.
Hamouri chose as his defense lawyer Leah Tsemel. On 16 February 2008, during a visit to Israel by Bernard Kouchner Hamouri's mother Denise managed to tell him she thought three years detention was more than enough. Kouchner took this as a request for a speedy trial, and two days later, the military prosecutor contacted Tsemel and offered a bargain: a seven-year term of imprisonment, rather than fourteen, if he admitted to the facts. The charges were that That he was a member of a youth cell of the PFLP That he intended to participate in a plot (against Ovadia).
The evidence for the latter was based on the fact that he was seen by an informer passing in front of Ovadia's home. The material for an indictment in the hands of the prosecution was thin. There was no physical evidence, weapons, intercepted letters, plan or phone taps. The only proof they could introduce consisted of testimonies, later retracted, given by other Palestinians, and Salah's own admission that he had indeed driven past Ovadia's home with a friend, one of the accused. Otherwise, Hamouri maintained he was innocent of the charges laid against him, and dismisses the idea that he and his friends were involved in a "plot".
On Tsemel's advice, while protesting his innocence, Hamouri entered into a plea bargaining arrangement before a military tribunal, – a compromise 95% of Palestinian prisoners adopt – admitting culpability in exchange for a 7-year prison sentence in order to avoid a longer term of imprisonment. Israeli authorities had also given him the option of either leaving Israel for 10 years or face 7 years in prison, Hamouri preferred incarceration to the prospect of exile.
2011 Release: the Shalit prisoner exchange Hamouri was eventually released on 18 December 2011 as part of a second tranche in a prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas involving another French citizen, the soldier Gilad Shalit who had been captured by Hamas and used as a bargaining chip by Hamas for the release of Palestinian prisoners. A disparity has been noted in the two cases: while Shalit was detained, French diplomacy was highly active in endeavours to secure the release of the French-Israeli, whereas a parallel request that a French Palestinian's case be raised as a political issue was ignored. Requests by Hamouri's mother, a Frenchwoman with a son in detention, to be received by Nicolas Sarkozy at the Élysée were rebuffed. Sarkozy had requested Israel to release Hamouri during his visit to the country in June 2008, and the following year in a letter to the Prime Minister on 30 July 2009, asked for clemency and a reduction of his sentence by a third in recognition of his good behaviour, as did Bernard Kouchner.
With the appointment of Alain Juppé as head of Foreign Affairs at the Quai d'Orsay, there was a slight change in the climate. Juppé wrote to Marie-France Beaufils, a senator, on 31 March 2011 that: I regret that the Israeli authorities did not make a decision to remit the sentence, especially as the confession made at the hearing was not corroborated by any evidence. I appreciate his family's grief as he is at an age for dedicating himself to study. I also understand that the person concerned has chosen not to ask for a pardon. It's an attitude worthy of respect.
Hamouri's release was conditioned on Ovadia's consent, which the latter gave reportedly in order to secure Shalit's release. Binjamin Netanyahu had regularly turned down official French requests for clemency on the grounds that he had to defer to the views of Ovadia. In 2011 Sarkozy therefore repeated the request directly in a letter to Ovadia, who, after consulting with Zvi Ammar in Marseille, replied that he would not oppose Harmouri's release. On regaining his freedom, when asked about his imprisonment, Hamouri replied he had no regrets about the choices he had made. With regard to Ovadia, he stated that the rabbi was and would remain a symbol of racism and fanaticism in Israel: Ovadia had likened Palestinians to reptiles in 2000, suggested that Arabs be wiped out with missiles, and hoped that God would smite them with a plague. His remarks were construed in Israeli media as confirming a desire by Hamouri that Ovadia be killed, a suggestion he rebuffed as a lie churned out by propaganda machinery.
His wife later commented that in Hamouri's case, French diplomacy had been based on "discretion": "they have been very discreet. The mere fact of being imprisoned in Israel turns one into a suspect, despite everything."
In France many commentators, prominent among them Pascal Boniface, have noted a striking incongruency between the way French diplomacy showcased the imprisonment of Shalit and treated his release as a matter of urgency, and the muted discretion – some say 'indifference' – shown to Hamouri's plight during his incarceration without trial for three years.
New studies (2011-2016)