CHICAGO — A soft-spoken Chicago-area grocer was forced to strip and wear a foul-smelling hood, deprived of sleep, and threatened with death by Israeli agents before he finally broke down and confessed to financing terrorist activity, his attorney told a federal jury yesterday.

“You don’t have to accept a case based on torture,” defense attorney Michael Deutsch told jurors at the opening of the racketeering trial of grocer Muhammad Salah and university professor Abdelhaleem Ashqar.

Mr. Salah, 53, of Bridgeview, and Mr. Ashqar, 48, of Alexandria, Va., are charged in a four-count racketeering indictment with furnishing money and recruits for a terrorism campaign aimed at toppling Israel’s government.

Mr. Salah was arrested in Israel in January 1993 and served four and a half years in prisons there after confessing that he was delivering money to fighting forces of the Palestinian Arab organization Hamas.

But Mr. Deutsch said Mr. Salah was subjected to torture, which he said was standard operating procedure for Israeli security forces fighting Hamas.

“They are notorious throughout the world for getting information through coercion and torture — the Israeli secret police,” he said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Carrie Hamilton said in the government’s opening statement that the admissions made by Mr. Salah in 1993 would show he had delivered cash to Hamas military units.

She also said a former New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, would testify that she witnessed part of the interrogation of Mr. Salah and saw no torture or mistreatment.

She said Messrs. Salah and Ashqar aided “a sophisticated global terrorist organization” that killed numerous people in shootings and bombings.

But Mr. Deutsch said Ms. Miller had been duped into believing that Mr. Salah had not been tortured. He said what the former reporter saw was a man who had been broken by days of cruel treatment and would do anything his interrogators asked him to do.

He noted that two of the Israeli interrogators who are expected to testify at the trial use aliases, saying it was because “they torture people.” Federal prosecutors have said the aliases are needed to avoid reprisals by members of Hamas.

Mr. Deutsch portrayed Mr. Salah as a kindly man who collected money to help Palestinian Arabs living in squalid conditions in refugee camps on the West Bank. He said that, not terrorism, was the reason for Mr. Salah’s 1993 trip.