NEWARK — Israeli military officials threatened to kill the family of Imam Mohammad Qatanani and repeatedly tortured him while he was detained in 1993, he said during his testimony Monday morning in U.S. Immigration Court.

In the fourth day of the Paterson imam’s deportation trial, Qatanani provided a detailed account of his three months in detention after crossing the border between Jordan and Palestine.

“At that time, you feel death is better than life,” said Qatanani, who struggled not to cry when he recounted his time in detention. “A human being living in that place has no rights. He has nothing.”

Immigration authorities are seeking to deport Qatanani because he did not state on his application for U.S. permanent residency that he was arrested by Israeli authorities and charged with confessing to assisting Hamas. The prosecution presented documents from Israel outlining the charges, but they have not been authenticated and Judge Alberto J. Riefkohl has not officially admitted them to the court.

Qatanani stated that he received no paperwork about why he was being held or the terms of his release. He was able to renew his Palestinian permit and return to Jordan, the cleric stated. He said he had no formal meetings with his lawyer and never knew what his lawyer did to get him released.

In another part of his testimony Monday, Qatanani said he did not have good relations with the previous imam at the Islamic Center of Passaic County. Mohammed el-Mezain, the imam who preceded Qatanani at the mosque, was charged with raising money for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which authorities said funneled money to Palestinian terrorists. Earlier in the deportation case, the government asked one of the imam’s character witnesses if he knew that the two imams lived together in Paterson.

In his first opportunity to speak during the four-day deportation trial, Qatanani said that he interviewed for a job at a mosque in Chicago in 1997 because he did not get along with el-Mezain.

Before Qatanani’s testimony, Judge Riefkohl overturned the defense’s request to call Ronald S. Fava, a former attorney with the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office. Fava was one of two lawyers present during a 2005 meeting between Qatanani and members of the FBI regarding the imam’s stalled application for permanent U.S. residency.

The meeting, which Qatanani requested, was not taped. Earlier in the trial, the government’s lawyers called an FBI agent and immigration official to testify about the interview, where Qatanani discussed his visa application.

In Riefkohl’s decision, he said that the two witnesses had sufficiently recounted the interview during their testimony.

“I’m not coming to conclusions, but I think the record is very clear in what happened that day,” Riefkohl said.

The prosecution will cross-examine Qatanani on Monday afternoon.