(IsraelNN.com) The Palestinian Authority, led by the Fatah party, admitted to a British newspaper that its security forces commonly use torture on prisoners, as charged by the Hamas terrorist organization. The PA is heavily funded by overseas contributions as well as taxes collected for it by the Israeli government.

“This is a shame on the Palestinian Authority,” Haitham Arar, head of the human rights department of the PA Interior Ministry, told the Mail. She admitted that torture, beatings and extra-judicial murders have been common in the Abbas administration.

Britain is sending police and intelligence officers to the PA to help train a new department on how to question prisoners without torturing them.

Most of the victims are supporters of Hamas, which took over control of Gaza in violent clashes with Fatah forces two years, resulting in dozens of deaths.

The London newspaper said that many of the torture victims were too afraid to talk of their ordeal. It quoted one young man who disclosed he had been “assaulted with a high-voltage device with electrodes ‘like fingers.’”