B'Tselem Report Collaborators in the Occupied Territories: Human Rights Abuses and Violations, Comprehensive Report, January 1994

Dahaniyeh

Dahaniyeh is a Bedouin village established near Rafah by the Israeli authorities in 1975 in order to rehabilitate Bedouins who were evacuated from their lands in the area.⁷³ A few dozen Bedouin families were moved to the village and received state lands for agricultural use. The first houses were erected by the Military Government in the mid 1970s. Following the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, from 1979 to 1982, families of Bedouin collaborators from Sinai were also resettled in the village. During the Intifada a few dozen collaborators' families from the Gaza Strip found shelter at Dahaniyeh. Nearly all the collaborators in the village carry a weapon by permit. The village is ringed with barbed wire and is on the border with Egypt, near Rafah. A permanent IDF checkpoint is located at the entrance and only individuals with a special permit from the Civil Administration are allowed through. In October 1993 Dahaniyeh had a population of about 700; in December most of the collaborators were moved to Israel.

Residents told a B'Tselem representative who visited the village that despite the security, a wanted individual, Yasser Abu Samhadanah, from the Fatah Hawks, had entered the village several times to kill suspected collaborators. The families of six men who were killed in Dahaniyeh left the village and returned to the Gaza Strip. Some of the collaborators in the village were given Israeli ID cards and moved to Israel, living mainly in the vicinity of Arad and Beersheba.
Collaborators' families receive partial assistance from the Civil Administration in the form of food and money. Those who remain in the village complained to the B'Tselem representative that they are subjected to humiliating and demeaning treatment in the local institutions, such as the school, clinic, food stores, and so forth, at the hands of the veteran Bedouin population.
At the time of B'Tselem's visit, on December 26, 1993, there were still ten families of collaborators in the village. Some of the collaborators from the territories complained that those attacked and in need of rehabilitation, or those who wished to stop working with the GSS, were neglected by the security forces. The collaborator A.D. (full name in B'Tselem's files) told us on August 21, 1993:
No, they [the GSS] do not force you to work with them. On the contrary, their interest is to have people work with them only from their own free will. But on the other hand, I know what happened to collaborators who broke their connections with the GSS. There were agents that I recruited, and one day they decided to stop working with the GSS. Today they are treated like dogs. They have no Israeli entry and work permits, they have no exit permits to Jordan, and masked individuals are after them. They have no rest. Other collaborators who tried to sever their ties with the GSS suddenly discovered that their places of work in Israel received phone calls not to employ them.


A.S., a collaborator from the Bethlehem area:
A.S. worked for the GSS as an undercover collaborator from 1979 to 1982. In testimony to B'Tselem on May 16, 1993, he claimed that since 1989 he and his family have been subjected to attacks and threats by other Palestinians. As a result, the family moved to Qalqiliyah, but the attacks continued. A.S. returned to Bethlehem and in January 1993 applied to the Civil Administration for Israeli entry and work permits. After getting a lengthy runaround, he succeeded in arranging a meeting with Captain N., the GSS agent responsible for his area of residence. A.S. related:
I asked him, “What am I supposed to do, kill myself?” He replied: “Don't threaten me. If you want, go kill yourself,” and gave me a permit for Tel Aviv marked “For commercial purposes only.” That's the way it is, he said. A permit for commercial purposes means I have to go back to the territories every evening and I am not allowed to work. If I'm caught, I can expect a beating, a fine, and expulsion back to the territories. I have already been beaten by the police many times. If they send me back to the village, a death sentence awaits me there.
Two weeks ago I worked in a restaurant on King George Street, without a permit. The police came in for a check, and at the last minute I managed to escape. The police fined the owner 2,000 shekels for employing me.
Before, they could give me everything in the world. Now I don't interest them anymore. Once they would promise everything: you want a driver's license, take it, you want a weapon, take it. Now they won't even give me an emergency telephone. All I want now is a permanent residence permit for Israel and a work permit.
B'Tselem took the case of A.S. to an Israeli cabinet minister. On June 13, 1993, the minister informed us that, following a clarification, it had been decided to grant A.S. a residence permit for Israel, which he could pick up at the Civil Administration office in Bethlehem. According to A.S., when he went the following day to the Civil Administration, he was told that they had no knowledge of any such permit. On June 20, he said, masked individuals again tried to attack him when he paid a night visit to his family. On October 21, 1993, A.S. told B'Tselem: “Masked individuals encircled the house at three in the morning. I jumped barefoot from the balcony. I fought with one of the masked individuals who grabbed me, but I managed to get away.”
Not until a week later did A.S. receive from the GSS representative in the region a temporary permit to live and work in Israel, valid for three months only. He was told to apply again to the GSS agent twenty days before the permit expired in order to renew it. When he did so, he was told that the GSS coordinator in the area had been replaced, and was referred to the Civil Administration, where he was told that they did not deal with such matters. Only after further requests and delays did A.S. receive another temporary residence and work permit for Israel.
In a meeting with Yizhar Be'er of B'Tselem, Brig. Gen. Aryeh Ramot stated that the problems that had arisen in the case of A.S. were related to his criminal record (A.S. denies this, saying that with the exception of a complaint filed against him when he was a minor and later dropped, he has no criminal record). “In this case,” Brig. Gen. Ramot said, “after we removed the police restriction, we gave him a temporary residence permit for Israel. Afterward, if no problems arise, he will be given a permanent permit.”