Activities

• While HaMoked states that its main aim is “assisting Palestinians of the occupied territories whose rights are violated due to Israel’s policies,” it regularly represents families of terrorists responsible for carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel.
• Regularly petitions the High Court of Justice and makes inaccurate and inflammatory allegations of Israeli “apartheid,” “deportations,” “torture,” “collective punishment,” “forcible transfers,” and the “ghetto-ization of the West Bank.”

Legal Activity

• According to Hamoked, the NGO took part in 301 new legal activities in 2016 and another 305 in 2017.
• In several cases, Hamoked petitioned the Israeli High Court in the name of family members of terrorists, “Against the confiscation and demolition orders issued to the homes of Palestinians who are accused or suspected of committing murderous attacks.”
• Publishes “Case Summaries” that aim to “illustrate the mechanisms of the occupation” by “provid[ing] administrative and legal assistance to Palestinian individuals, who have been directly harmed by the injustices of the Israeli occupation.”
• “Court Watch” section of website “examines Israeli court decisions on issues relating to the occupation” and issues petitions addressing “the measures taken by Israel to control the OPT and manage the life of the protected population – restrictions on freedom of movement, violations of the right to family life, house demolitions, the settlements, the use of administrative detention, torture, and more.”
• In 2021, HaMoked represented Salah Hamouri when his residency permit was revoked by Israel.
  • Hamouri was arrested and convicted in 2005 for “attempting to assassinate Ovadia Yosef…and for his involvement with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” The PFLP has referred to Hamouri as a “comrade.”
  • According to Addameer, Hamouri was banned from entering the West Bank until September 2016, following his release in a prisoner exchange deal in 2011. (Hamouri was released in December 2011 as part of a swap of over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit). According to Samidoun, on February 26, 2018, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman signed a renewal of the administrative detention order to continue his imprisonment for another four months. The article notes that he had been arrested on August 27, 2017. In August 2017, Addameer petitioned the President of France for the release of Hamouri, who was ordered to six months in administrative detention on August 2017 for being a “security threat.” He was released on September 29, 2018.
• In April 2018, HaMoked, together with Yesh Din, Gisha, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), petitioned the High Court of Justice demanding that the “Court order the cancellation of open-fire regulations allowing IDF soldiers to fire live ammunition at demonstrators who do not endanger the lives of soldiers on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.” The petition ignores the violent nature of the protests, which included Molotov cocktails, arson, and attempts to breach the border fence with Israel.
• HaMoked has also represented the families of the terrorists responsible for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli boys, the Har Nof massacre (together with the PFLP affiliated NGO Addameer), the Henkin family murder, and the murders of Dani Gonen and Malachi Rozenfeld.

Political Advocacy

• In October 2021, HaMoked condemned the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. According to HaMoked, “HaMoked stands in full solidarity with Palestinian human rights organizations against this outrageous attempt to silence their important work. We are proud to be their partners in the struggle for Palestinians’ human rights.”
• In January 2021, HaMoked, alongside a number of Israeli, Palestinian, and international organizations, issued a declaration headlined “Israel must provide necessary vaccines to Palestinian health care systems.” The NGOs falsely claim that Israel has “legal obligations” to “ensure that quality vaccines be provided to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and control,” while altogether ignoring that Palestinians residing in Jerusalem are part of the Israeli health care system; that under the Oslo Accords the PA is responsible for health care of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; and that the PA has adopted its own vaccine policyfor its population.
• In June 2020, Nadia Daqqa, a member of HaMoked’s legal team, participated in a webinar titled “A Travesty of Justice: Palestinian Child Prisoners and Israeli Military Justice” that discussedthe “role and impact of military justice on Palestinians and its function in Israel’s occupation.” The webinar contained multiple distortions and omissions. See the NGO Campaign to Exploit Children’s Rights for more information.
• In June 2019, HaMoked was a signatory on a statement calling on the German Bundestag to revoke its joint resolution defining BDS campaigns against Israel as antisemitic.
• In April 2018, HaMoked published a report titled “Childhood in Chains: The Detention and Interrogation of Palestinian Teenagers in the West Bank,” making numerous false and misleading claims about the IDF and Israeli military courts. (For a complete discussion of these inaccuracies, see NGO Monitor’s reports “The Origins of ‘No Way to Treat a Child’: Analyzing UNICEF’s Report on Palestinian Minors” and “No Way to Represent a Child: Defense for Children International Palestine’s Distortions of the Israeli Justice System.”)
• In October 2017, HaMoked and B’Tselem published a joint report, “Unprotected: The Detention of Palestinian Teenagers in East Jerusalem,” that is part of an international NGO-led campaign of demonization that falsely accused Israel of abusing children’s rights. The publication also suffered from fundamental methodological flaws, highlighting the appropriation of human rights for political objectives.
• On February 24, 2016, HaMoked, along with B’Tselem, released a report “Backed by the System,” funded by the EU, alleging “Abuse and Torture” in Israeli prisons. The claims come from terrorists and suspected terrorists who were imprisoned in late 2013 and early 2014, and who were referred to the NGOs by their relatives. In contrast to the impression created in this report, only 14 of the 116 prisoners complained about “physical violence” during interrogation, and these allegations cannot be independently confirmed.
• Submitted a written statement to the 2009 Goldstone Commission, together with other Israeli NGOs, that failed to address alleged war crimes by Hamas, “but rather offers our own distinct perspective – human rights violations for which Israel must be held accountable.” The NGOs make the unsupported claim that “[t]o the extent that this was planned as a punitive operation which main purpose was not the achievement of actual military objectives, but the inflicting of deliberate damage as a deterrent and punitive measure.”
• Published an Online Legal Library (in “co-operation with Diakonia”) that included documents providing a distorted view or incorrect analysis of international law in order to criminalize Israeli actions, such as the false claim that “phosphorous and cluster bombs” are “illegal weapons prohibited by International Humanitarian Law.”
• In a 2009 petition about the security barrier, HaMoked wrote that that the case constituted “apartheid” and claimed that “there is no difference between the regime at issue in this petition…and the racial segregation regime in the southern states of the USA in the first half of the 20th century” (translated from the original Hebrew).
• In 2006, Israel’s State Prosecutor concluded that HaMoked’s “self-presentation as ‘a human rights organization’ has no basis in reality and is designed to mislead.”

Staff

• In September 2017, Jessica Montell became the Executive Director of Hamoked.
  • Montell is the former Director of B’Tselem and SISO: Save Israel, Stop the Occupation.
  • Montell has said: “I think the word apartheid is useful for mobilizing people because of its emotional power. In some cases, the situation in the West Bank is worse than apartheid in South Africa.”
  • In 2009, Montell claimed that “Israel has only itself to blame” for Goldstone’s one-sided conclusions and recommendations. She also stated that Israel was “shoot[ing] the messenger and bury[ing] its head in the sand.”
• Daniel Seidemann, founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem, is a Board Member of HaMoked.
  • Seidemann has claimed that Israel’s actions in Jerusalem are “contributing to the transformation of a resolvable national-political conflict into an intractable mix of jihad, war of mitzvah, and Armageddon – a religious war driven by the Biblical imagery.”
  • On July 4, 2017, Seidemann spoke at a Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) briefing on “Jerusalem, 50 Years On: Unification or Occupation?” stating that “Israel has a choice…either it can have its united Jerusalem, or it can have international legitimacy. It cannot have both.” Seidemann furthered that “while it used to be a ‘benign’ occupation that existed,” it was now an “’unapologetic’ and ‘metastasizing’ occupation which exercises constant collective punishment” (emphasis added).
  • In July 2017, Seidemann stated in an interview with the World Council of Churches (WCC) that “For most of the time since 1967, the occupation of the West Bank has been military, while it has been of a more colonial nature in east Jerusalem. There is no military rule there, although the Israelis crush anything more radical than a scout meeting. And Palestinians are permanently politically disempowered.”
  • In a June 2017 interview with the BBC, Seidemann stated that the “greatest threat to the Jewish people in this generation to be perpetual occupation and Israelis are in a state of clinical denial.” When asked “What’s the mechanism that brings Israel to an end if you don’tdisengage from occupation,” Seidemann answered “Decay [and] isolation.”