Adalah Demands Halt to Unlawful Policy of Detaining and Searching Mobile Phones of Palestinian Residents in East Jerusalem

31/03/2024

Adalah: The policy is illegal, representing a grave violation of fundamental rights, and amounts to clear racial profiling.

Update: In a letter dated 27 March 2024, the Ministry of Justice's Legal Advisory and Legislation Department (Criminal Law Division) responded to Adalah's letter. The Ministry confirmed that warrantless searches of mobile phones are illegal, while alleging that it had insufficient information about individual incidents to assess Adalah’s specific claims. The Ministry further noted that the guidelines regarding phone searches at border crossings had been updated.

On 14 January 2024, Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, in collaboration with the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, sent a letter to the Attorney General, Police Commissioner and the Jerusalem Police Commander, demanding their immediate action to halt the Jerusalem District Police’s unlawful and arbitrary policy of searching the mobile phones of Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. Adalah argued that the policy was illegal and represented a grave and illegitimate violation of fundamental rights, and amounted to clear racial profiling.

CLICK HERE to read the letter (Hebrew)

Since the outbreak of the war, according to reports and testimonies received by Adalah, the Jerusalem District Police has been arbitrarily detaining Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem and conducting searches of their belongings, including unauthorized searches of their mobile devices at checkpoints.

In the letter sent by Adalah Attorney Hadeel Abu Salih, Adalah emphasized that, according to testimonies from the field, the police have been conducting searches at checkpoints including Hizma, Checkpoint 300, Qalandiya and ad-hoc checkpoints in East Jerusalem. Adalah argued that this policy was directed specifically towards Palestinian residents, constituting unlawful racial profiling and an act of collective punishment against Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem.

The letter detailed a case involving a female resident of East Jerusalem, identified as ‘A’. While passing through Checkpoint 300, A was stopped by police and instructed to open the glove compartment of her car. There, the officers found keys with an Arabic inscription displaying lyrics from a song by Mahmoud Darweesh, translated as “On this land which makes life worth living”. They accused her of providing a false translation, asserting that it meant “We will remain,” and deeming it “dramatic and dangerous”. Subsequently, A was detained for over an hour, during which time officers searched her car, wallet, and mobile device. She was specifically instructed to open the WhatsApp and Telegram apps and officers scrutinized her personal conversations. While searching her phone, the officers claimed that the lack of private messages on Telegram, a platform she said she only used for news, was suspicious.

Adalah argued in the letter that mobile devices hold vast amounts of private data, the invasion of which represents a serious infringement of an individual’s rights to privacy and freedom of movement, particularly when undertaken without a search warrant. Additionally, the searches have been conducted without appropriate restrictions on the officers’ access to the private information stored in these personal devices. Adalah further stressed that the detentions and searches have been carried out in public and in an arbitrary manner, with the result that the individuals involved appear, without basis, to be criminal suspects, in a violation of their rights to dignity and personal autonomy.

Crucially, under Israeli law, the decision to detain an individual should be based on reasonable suspicion that they have committed a criminal offense, a legal requirement that the aforementioned policy of arbitrary detentions and searches at checkpoints blatantly fails to meet.