‘Israel’ arrested countless Palestinians for ‘no reason’, says ex-top Shin Bet officer

Occupied Palestine (QNN)- A former senior member of Israel’s security service Shin Bet said the agency would arrest Palestinians in Lebanon during the Lebanon War in the 1980s “for no reason.”

Haim Rubovitch, who served for 25 years in the Shin Bet in posts ranging from case officer to head of a directorate, made the remarks in a series of conversations with Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, and published earlier this week.

Rubovitch was a case officer at the time of the Lebanon War, in charge of one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon at the time, the Rashidiya refugee camp.

“We made arrests in crazy numbers. We filled the Ansar detention camp to capacity,” the ex-top Shin Bet officer stated.

“Throw a stone and you would hit a wanted person. We arrested countless people for no reason,” he said.

“The truth is that the only way to survive in Lebanon in those years was for someone to join an armed militia,” Rubovitch said of the situation for Palestinians at refugee camps.

‘Israel’ made a “mistake” when it did not ally itself with Lebanese figures linked to Amal, then the biggest and most influential Shia militia in Lebanon, he said.

Rubovitch said he left the agency in 2005 because he had grown tired of the security sector, and had progressed as far up the chain of command as he possibly could have.

On recent events, Rubovitch said “a line was crossed” when the Israeli occupation government last year allowed Shin Bet to use mobile phone tracing to locate persons who came into contact with victims of COVID-19.

Shin Bet used the same technology to track down Palestinians amid unrest over Israeli incursions on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Text messages were sent to Palestinians, warning: “We will hold you accountable”.

Speaking with Haaretz about his experience, he said, “If the goal is to continue to control [Palestinians] fate, then we have had great success. If we had any aspiration for a permanent solution, though, we didn’t move forward by even a millimeter…The situation that has been created [in which Israel controls the fate of the West Bank Palestinians] is not moral, not Jewish, not principled and not anything. Do you think the Palestinians will get used to it? That will never happen.”