Father and step-mother charged in Israel for nine-year lock-up of daughter

The Tel Aviv District Attorney’s office on Tuesday filed charges against an Arab-Israeli couple for keeping their daughter locked up for nine years. Details of the indictment served at the Petah Tikva District Court said the father and stepmother of the 20-year-old woman kept her locked in a bathroom or other small rooms in three different houses across the West Bank. The charges allege the woman was first locked away at age 11, and was allowed out only at night to clean the house, do laundry and cook. The woman’s father is accused of beating her, sometimes at his wife’s prodding, and the pair are said to have encouraged her to kill herself, even implying she should use the husband’s shaving razor blade. The two are being charged with abusing a minor, unwarranted imprisonment and attempting to pressure a person to commit suicide. The father was arrested by Palestinian security forces in the West Bank town of Qalqilya earlier this month. A spokesman for the forces said the man “had chosen to keep his own daughter in these conditions for fear of her becoming a sexual assault victim.” The young woman was handed first to Palestinian social services and then reunited with her mother, a Palestinian living in the West Bank, who had divorced the woman’s father years earlier. The woman’s stepmother was subsequently arrested in Israel.