Chilling reports on prisoner of conscience A. Makhoul

JNews, out of London, is reporting that Palestinian-Israeli civil society organizer Ameer Makhoul was finally allowed to see his lawyers on May 17, after his first eleven days of being imprisoned at the orders of the Shin Bet ‘security’ agency.
The lawyers reported that Makhoul “was trembling and apathetic throughout their meeting with him, and his skin showed patches of discolouration.”
JNews noted that the lawyers were unable to say any more about his condition because of “the gag order in force regarding both conditions of detention and interrogation methods used.”
Makhoul, JNews writes,

has provided [his lawyers] with testimony regarding the methods of his interrogation and conditions of detention. According to the lawyers, these may amount to torture or ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ under the UN Convention Against Torture.

Makhoul is the head of the civil-society organization Ittijah. (More about him, here.) He was detained on May 9 and no charges have been brought against him since then.
JNews– which seems like an excellent new initiative– adds this:

Prison authorities confirmed to the legal team that Makhoul had been seen by a doctor twice in the course of his interrogation.
Despite requests by both the legal team and rights group Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-Israel) to see his medical documents these have not been disclosed. Nor has permission to send an independent doctor to visit Makhoul been granted. The Israel Prisons Service (IPS) claims that permission can only be given by the shabac [Shin Bet], which has failed so far to respond to these requests.
…No formal charge has been laid against Makhoul…
Meanwhile, he remains defined as a ‘security detainee’ and as such he is held in isolation and subject to an interrogation which the police and shabac are exempt from recording fully. He is still prohibited from meeting his family and has no right to make a telephone call or send a letter.
In a related case, the Court has extended the detention of Dr. Omar Sa’id until Thursday, 27 May, when he is expected to be indicted on the charge of contact with a foreign agent. The gag order on both cases is scheduled to be lifted at noon the same day.

These gag orders– very similar to what the Apartheid regime in South Africa used to achieve with its “banning” orders– make it an offense for Israeli media even to write about the case. Of course, in the era of globalized communications that doesn’t make much sense. (But it makes it even more important for those of us outside Israel to continue to make this news available.)
In related news, JNews reported yesterday that,

Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a bill Sunday to revoke citizenship of Israelis convicted of terrorist activity or of espionage for terrorist organisations.
The bill has been passed on to the Knesset for a first vote slated to take place on Wednesday.

Ah, that old canard, accusations of “terrorism”! And this time being used to take away the citizenship of people like, for example, Ameer Makhoul or [Balad Party head] Omar Sa’id, if they should be convicted.
Does no-one in the Israeli Jewish community have any folk memory about the history of states taking away the citizenship of vulnerable groups of citizens??