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Photos of Arwa Sheikh Ali’s cheek after his arrest showed wounds including triangular marks and lines. The police denied the accusations and said the shapes had been made by an officer’s shoelaces.
Lawyers for a Palestinian man who was arrested by the Israeli police said officers beat him and imprinted his face with a Star of David, and they have demanded an investigation.
The police denied the accusation, saying it was misleading.
The man, Arwa Sheikh Ali, 22, was arrested on Wednesday as part of an investigation into drug dealing in the Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem, where Mr. Sheikh Ali lives.
Rights advocates said Mr. Sheikh Ali’s injuries were indicative of a broader problem of brutality by Israeli forces, especially against Palestinians.
Vadim Shub, head of the Jerusalem public defender’s office, which is representing Mr. Sheikh Ali, said in an interview on Sunday, “The mark on his face is the tip of the iceberg,” adding, “We want to raise the issue of police violence.”
A photograph the police issued of Mr. Sheikh Ali’s injuries showed wounds on his upper left cheek, underneath a black eye, that resembled two incomplete triangles and horizontal lines.
At a hearing in Jerusalem on Sunday, a judge declined a request by the prosecutor’s office to hold Mr. Sheikh Ali for a further five days and released him on bail to house arrest, citing evidence of the injuries. “From the photos shown to me, it appears that the arrest was accompanied by severe violence,” the judge, Adi Bartal, said.
The Israeli police said Mr. Sheikh Ali had resisted arrest and attacked officers who were executing a warrant in the refugee camp. The police called allegations that Mr. Sheikh Ali’s face had been marked with a Star of David “misleading and distorted.”
The shapes on his cheek had “presumably” been made by “an article of clothing worn by one of the police officers,” the police said, and they released a photograph of a black shoe with the laces circled in red to suggest what had caused the marks.
The police said officers had used “reasonable force” in arresting Mr. Sheikh Ali and did not respond to questions about how an officer’s shoe might have caused the injuries to his face.
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Mr. Shub said the mark was still evident four days after Mr. Sheikh Ali’s arrest.
“When his lawyer visited him, he saw that he was heavily beaten, and he saw a sign that looks like a Star of David,” Mr. Shub said.
Mr. Shub said that 16 officers had been present during Mr. Sheikh Ali’s arrest but that there was no body-camera footage. The police did not answer questions about the lack of recordings.
The Israeli news media has raised questions about how Mr. Sheikh Ali had suffered such apparently severe injuries while in police custody and why there was no body-camera video. A 2018 police regulation says that officers must turn on body cameras in every policing interaction, according to the nonprofit Association for Civil Rights in Israel.
“It’s very problematic to say they used reasonable force because of the number of police officers and the nature of his marks and bruises on his body,” Mr. Shub added.
Mr. Sheikh Ali had been blindfolded, a common Israeli police practice with Palestinian detainees particularly in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Mr. Shub said, and therefore did not see what object made the mark.
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Avner Rosengarten, the founder of the private Institute of Forensic Science in Jerusalem, said it seemed unlikely that shoelaces caused the marks on Mr. Sheikh Ali’s face. “The laces on the shoe are flexible; they are not rigid,” he said, noting that it was more likely that a hard object had made the marks.
The public defender’s office has filed an official complaint with the police’s internal investigation office.
In 2021, of 4,401 complaints that were sent to the police’s internal investigation unit, only 1.2 percent resulted in an indictment, according to a report by the Israeli state comptroller released in May.
Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer who defends Palestinian rights in Israeli courts, said those figures indicated that there was “a general lack of enforcement against police brutality.”
In 2020, Israeli officers shot and killed Iyad al-Hallaq, a 31-year-old unarmed Palestinian with autism, which activists at the time compared to the killing of George Floyd five days earlier in the United States. Last month, an Israeli court acquitted the police officer who had been charged with manslaughter in Mr. al-Hallaq’s killing.
Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer, said the case involving Mr. Sheikh Ali had particular resonance because of the marks.
“There’s something about this case that captures the mind of people who usually would look away when it comes to police brutality against Palestinians,” he said. “It is a very symbolic abuse, one that many Jews remember or have an immediate connection to because in the past Jews have been victims of similar humiliation.”
Myra Noveck and Hiba Yazbek contributed reporting.
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