NefeshBarYochai
2024-01-18 04:44:56 UTC
Dozens of patients stand in line for hours outside the pharmacy booth
in the Kuwaiti Hospital compound. They all start out by asking the
pharmacist the same question: is my medication available? The answer
for most is no.
Amid the long lines of the elderly, the ill, and mothers carrying
their children, a man appearing to be middle-aged leaning on a young
boy arrives, speaking in a loud voice and asking to be allowed to jump
the line hes just been released from prison, and can barely stand.
I spent sixty days of constant beating and humiliated, he says.
They just released me, and I need to just get my medicine. Please let
me take it without having to wait any longer.
Everyone lets him through, allowing him to collect his medications
from the booth and leave.
I stand beside him in the hospital courtyard and ask him how he came
to be arrested by the Israeli army and how he was eventually
released.
Haytham al-Hilou, 56, was displaced from Beit Hanoun to southern Gaza
on October 27 of last year. He says that on his journey south, he was
made to pass through a mechanized checkpoint that the Israeli army had
set up at the Netzarim junction on Salah al-Din Street. When he passed
through the metal doors, and the Israeli cameras picked up his image,
Israeli soldiers called out his name through a microphone, instructing
him to step aside. Al-Hilou was sent to an Israeli detention center,
where he would endure sixty days of torture and humiliation
interspersed with interrogations for any piece of information that
might be of use to the army in identifying and reaching specific
targets.
When I reached the detention point, the soldiers ordered me to take
off all my clothes, he says. They told us to go wait in a ditch dug
by the army a distance away from the checkpoint.
When he slid down into the ditch, he noticed it was already occupied
by dozens of Palestinians who had also been detained, all of them
naked and blindfolded. Not much time had passed before soldiers
arrived and blindfolded him as well.
Haytham had been fleeing south with his wife and five children, and
when he was arrested, there was no one left to look after them.
Al-Hilou says his family suffered immensely during his period of
imprisonment, struggling to find any shelter that would take them in.
When I was released, I found my family homeless and in the streets,
he continues. No shelter, no food, no drink. Every drop of water and
piece of bread that they managed to find was after a long period of
suffering.
He says it was a miracle that he found his family alive at all,
especially since all his children were very young, including his three
daughters and two young boys.
When he was first arrested, he didnt know where he was being taken.
After a long journey, he found himself in Ofer Prison, outside of
Ramallah in the West Bank.
At Ofer, he was interrogated and subjected to physical and
psychological torture. Israeli intelligence officers denied him food
for long periods, holding interrogation sessions for hours on end.
They would ask him about the hiding places of Hamas leaders like Yahya
Sinwar and demand to know whether there were openings to tunnels
inside his home. He kept repeating the same answer.
I am a normal civilian. I am uninvolved in any military activity.
The interrogators would beat him severely and often. As an older man
with graying hair, a short frame, and a fragile build, he was unable
to endure what had become standard treatment by the Shin Bet.
And the questions would continue. Where are the Hamas leaders? Where
are they hiding?
His answers turned into shouts at one point. I dont know! I dont
know! I am not a Hamas member! I have nothing to do with resistance. I
have nothing to do with military activity. I dont know where the
Hamas leaders are, I dont know anything about them. Civilians dont
know these things, only leaders do. Normal people dont know who they
are. Theyre always in hiding.
Despite all this, al-Hilou is grateful that he was eventually released
and allowed to return home and that he is now in his familys arms.
He says that prison during the war is different than in any other
period. Prisoners from Gaza are worried about their families,
wondering whether theyve been able to find shelter, whether they were
able to secure food, or whether they were dead or alive.
Haytham maintains that there was no reason for his arrest, and no
evidence pointed to his involvement in any resistance or military
activity. He does mention that between the ages of 17 and 20, he
engaged in public activities that supported the resistance but which
were not military by any stretch.
Maybe Israel wanted to punish me for my youth, years that are behind
me and well in the past, he speculates.
In those youthful years, the activities showing support for the
resistance that he and his friends had participated in were not at all
uncommon. After all, who, in all of Palestine, doesnt support
resistance against the occupation?
Arrested twice in the same day
There are endless stories of arbitrary incarcerations that have taken
place at the numerous Israeli military checkpoints throughout the Gaza
Strip, where the army maintains control. Some people were arrested
once, twice, and even three times during their stay in Gaza City,
having refused to leave as part of Israels ethnic cleansing of
northern Gaza. Eyad Eleywa is one of those residents. He is still in
Gaza City, while several of his children chose to flee south. They are
now in Rafah.
Eleywa resides in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood along with his wife,
three of his children, his daughter-in-law, and a number of his other
relatives who had fled from the areas north of Gaza City to the city
itself. His son Muhammad lives in a tent in the neighborhood of Tal
al-Sultan in Rafah. I get to see him every now and again. He recounts
the time his father was most recently arrested in northern Gaza.
Muhammads father has already been arrested three times, and two of
those arrests happened on the same day. Muhammad says that at the
beginning of the ground operation in Gaza City, soldiers took his
father from his home in Sheikh Radwan and ordered him to take off all
his clothes before blindfolding him and leaving him out in the cold
while conducting field interrogations.
Where are the tunnel openings? Where are the Hamas fighters? Who do
you know who owns weapons in the city? The questions werent asked
only once, and he was detained from the early morning until the late
afternoon. When the soldiers were done with him, they dropped him off
in al-Tuwan, far away from his home in Sheikh Radwan. They ordered the
elderly man, naked and beaten, deprived of food and water for that
entire period, to walk back.
On that same evening, as he returned home on foot, he was arrested a
second time at another checkpoint in the area separating al-Tuwan from
the al-Nasr neighborhood. He spent the entire night in Israeli custody
and was released the following day.
When they gather the detainees in one place, they line them up one by
one and terrorize them, Muhammad says, relaying his fathers account
of his treatment while under arrest. They move from one person to the
next, telling each of them, Were going to send you to your God, and
Were going to send you to heaven to marry the virgins.
Horror hidden from the world
Those who have gone through these ordeals and lived to tell the tale
consider themselves lucky because they were eventually released and
returned to their families. Countless others have effectively been
disappeared, abducted one day at an army checkpoint and with no
further news of their fate or whereabouts.
Every time I scroll through social media, I come across people posting
about their missing family members, all of them saying that their
loved ones were lost at an Israeli checkpoint. The Israeli army
releases very little information about who it has arrested at these
checkpoints. The arrested include doctors, journalists, patients,
fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and people from all walks of
life. Their loved ones are constantly putting out announcements and
calling on international bodies and human rights organizations to
intervene and force Israel to reveal their loved ones whereabouts.
Eyewitnesses who were able to escape death and reach Rafah tell
horrific stories of how Israeli soldiers used civilians, especially
male adolescents, as human shields or worse. One eyewitness who
preferred to remain anonymous relayed a harrowing story of how Israeli
soldiers, upon discovering a tunnel opening in northern Gaza, strapped
explosives to a young 17-year-old mans chest, legs, and arms and
forced him to go down into the tunnel, lowering him with a rope and
fastening a camera to his head. They would give him orders to go left,
right, or forward as they observed from a screen aboveground.
The eyewitness says that when the soldiers were fitting him with
explosives, they were laughing and cracking jokes, boasting that they
would send him to his God piece by piece, and that he would meet
the virgins in the tunnels. The eyewitness says that this practice
was common in Beit Hanoun, as the army made use of thin young men
capable of moving with agility in small spaces. The eyewitness says
that when soldiers noticed suspicious movements through the camera
fastened to their captives, they would blow up the tunnel and the
young man along with it. Whenever the tunnel was revealed to lead to a
dead end or was discovered to be deserted, the young man would return
unharmed, and the soldiers would remove the explosives from him.
While these harrowing details that continue to emerge from survivors
are so horrific as to beggar belief, the reality is that the
occupation has succeeded in isolating the Gaza Strip from the rest of
the world and rendering the majority of the crimes of its troops on
the ground invisible. Israel is systematically blocking foreign
journalists from reaching Gaza, assassinating Palestinian journalists,
and enforcing a total information blackout through the cutting off of
electricity, internet, and telecommunications.
In other words, Israels blackout strategy has worked, even with all
the gory images that still manage to make their way to your screens.
The relative scale of the killing has prompted the world to recognize
that a genocide is unfolding, but the horrific character of Israels
crimes and the abject inhumanity of the armys conduct still remain
largely unknown to most of the world.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/01/the-shocking-inhumanity-of-israels-crimes-in-gaza/
"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"
in the Kuwaiti Hospital compound. They all start out by asking the
pharmacist the same question: is my medication available? The answer
for most is no.
Amid the long lines of the elderly, the ill, and mothers carrying
their children, a man appearing to be middle-aged leaning on a young
boy arrives, speaking in a loud voice and asking to be allowed to jump
the line hes just been released from prison, and can barely stand.
I spent sixty days of constant beating and humiliated, he says.
They just released me, and I need to just get my medicine. Please let
me take it without having to wait any longer.
Everyone lets him through, allowing him to collect his medications
from the booth and leave.
I stand beside him in the hospital courtyard and ask him how he came
to be arrested by the Israeli army and how he was eventually
released.
Haytham al-Hilou, 56, was displaced from Beit Hanoun to southern Gaza
on October 27 of last year. He says that on his journey south, he was
made to pass through a mechanized checkpoint that the Israeli army had
set up at the Netzarim junction on Salah al-Din Street. When he passed
through the metal doors, and the Israeli cameras picked up his image,
Israeli soldiers called out his name through a microphone, instructing
him to step aside. Al-Hilou was sent to an Israeli detention center,
where he would endure sixty days of torture and humiliation
interspersed with interrogations for any piece of information that
might be of use to the army in identifying and reaching specific
targets.
When I reached the detention point, the soldiers ordered me to take
off all my clothes, he says. They told us to go wait in a ditch dug
by the army a distance away from the checkpoint.
When he slid down into the ditch, he noticed it was already occupied
by dozens of Palestinians who had also been detained, all of them
naked and blindfolded. Not much time had passed before soldiers
arrived and blindfolded him as well.
Haytham had been fleeing south with his wife and five children, and
when he was arrested, there was no one left to look after them.
Al-Hilou says his family suffered immensely during his period of
imprisonment, struggling to find any shelter that would take them in.
When I was released, I found my family homeless and in the streets,
he continues. No shelter, no food, no drink. Every drop of water and
piece of bread that they managed to find was after a long period of
suffering.
He says it was a miracle that he found his family alive at all,
especially since all his children were very young, including his three
daughters and two young boys.
When he was first arrested, he didnt know where he was being taken.
After a long journey, he found himself in Ofer Prison, outside of
Ramallah in the West Bank.
At Ofer, he was interrogated and subjected to physical and
psychological torture. Israeli intelligence officers denied him food
for long periods, holding interrogation sessions for hours on end.
They would ask him about the hiding places of Hamas leaders like Yahya
Sinwar and demand to know whether there were openings to tunnels
inside his home. He kept repeating the same answer.
I am a normal civilian. I am uninvolved in any military activity.
The interrogators would beat him severely and often. As an older man
with graying hair, a short frame, and a fragile build, he was unable
to endure what had become standard treatment by the Shin Bet.
And the questions would continue. Where are the Hamas leaders? Where
are they hiding?
His answers turned into shouts at one point. I dont know! I dont
know! I am not a Hamas member! I have nothing to do with resistance. I
have nothing to do with military activity. I dont know where the
Hamas leaders are, I dont know anything about them. Civilians dont
know these things, only leaders do. Normal people dont know who they
are. Theyre always in hiding.
Despite all this, al-Hilou is grateful that he was eventually released
and allowed to return home and that he is now in his familys arms.
He says that prison during the war is different than in any other
period. Prisoners from Gaza are worried about their families,
wondering whether theyve been able to find shelter, whether they were
able to secure food, or whether they were dead or alive.
Haytham maintains that there was no reason for his arrest, and no
evidence pointed to his involvement in any resistance or military
activity. He does mention that between the ages of 17 and 20, he
engaged in public activities that supported the resistance but which
were not military by any stretch.
Maybe Israel wanted to punish me for my youth, years that are behind
me and well in the past, he speculates.
In those youthful years, the activities showing support for the
resistance that he and his friends had participated in were not at all
uncommon. After all, who, in all of Palestine, doesnt support
resistance against the occupation?
Arrested twice in the same day
There are endless stories of arbitrary incarcerations that have taken
place at the numerous Israeli military checkpoints throughout the Gaza
Strip, where the army maintains control. Some people were arrested
once, twice, and even three times during their stay in Gaza City,
having refused to leave as part of Israels ethnic cleansing of
northern Gaza. Eyad Eleywa is one of those residents. He is still in
Gaza City, while several of his children chose to flee south. They are
now in Rafah.
Eleywa resides in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood along with his wife,
three of his children, his daughter-in-law, and a number of his other
relatives who had fled from the areas north of Gaza City to the city
itself. His son Muhammad lives in a tent in the neighborhood of Tal
al-Sultan in Rafah. I get to see him every now and again. He recounts
the time his father was most recently arrested in northern Gaza.
Muhammads father has already been arrested three times, and two of
those arrests happened on the same day. Muhammad says that at the
beginning of the ground operation in Gaza City, soldiers took his
father from his home in Sheikh Radwan and ordered him to take off all
his clothes before blindfolding him and leaving him out in the cold
while conducting field interrogations.
Where are the tunnel openings? Where are the Hamas fighters? Who do
you know who owns weapons in the city? The questions werent asked
only once, and he was detained from the early morning until the late
afternoon. When the soldiers were done with him, they dropped him off
in al-Tuwan, far away from his home in Sheikh Radwan. They ordered the
elderly man, naked and beaten, deprived of food and water for that
entire period, to walk back.
On that same evening, as he returned home on foot, he was arrested a
second time at another checkpoint in the area separating al-Tuwan from
the al-Nasr neighborhood. He spent the entire night in Israeli custody
and was released the following day.
When they gather the detainees in one place, they line them up one by
one and terrorize them, Muhammad says, relaying his fathers account
of his treatment while under arrest. They move from one person to the
next, telling each of them, Were going to send you to your God, and
Were going to send you to heaven to marry the virgins.
Horror hidden from the world
Those who have gone through these ordeals and lived to tell the tale
consider themselves lucky because they were eventually released and
returned to their families. Countless others have effectively been
disappeared, abducted one day at an army checkpoint and with no
further news of their fate or whereabouts.
Every time I scroll through social media, I come across people posting
about their missing family members, all of them saying that their
loved ones were lost at an Israeli checkpoint. The Israeli army
releases very little information about who it has arrested at these
checkpoints. The arrested include doctors, journalists, patients,
fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and people from all walks of
life. Their loved ones are constantly putting out announcements and
calling on international bodies and human rights organizations to
intervene and force Israel to reveal their loved ones whereabouts.
Eyewitnesses who were able to escape death and reach Rafah tell
horrific stories of how Israeli soldiers used civilians, especially
male adolescents, as human shields or worse. One eyewitness who
preferred to remain anonymous relayed a harrowing story of how Israeli
soldiers, upon discovering a tunnel opening in northern Gaza, strapped
explosives to a young 17-year-old mans chest, legs, and arms and
forced him to go down into the tunnel, lowering him with a rope and
fastening a camera to his head. They would give him orders to go left,
right, or forward as they observed from a screen aboveground.
The eyewitness says that when the soldiers were fitting him with
explosives, they were laughing and cracking jokes, boasting that they
would send him to his God piece by piece, and that he would meet
the virgins in the tunnels. The eyewitness says that this practice
was common in Beit Hanoun, as the army made use of thin young men
capable of moving with agility in small spaces. The eyewitness says
that when soldiers noticed suspicious movements through the camera
fastened to their captives, they would blow up the tunnel and the
young man along with it. Whenever the tunnel was revealed to lead to a
dead end or was discovered to be deserted, the young man would return
unharmed, and the soldiers would remove the explosives from him.
While these harrowing details that continue to emerge from survivors
are so horrific as to beggar belief, the reality is that the
occupation has succeeded in isolating the Gaza Strip from the rest of
the world and rendering the majority of the crimes of its troops on
the ground invisible. Israel is systematically blocking foreign
journalists from reaching Gaza, assassinating Palestinian journalists,
and enforcing a total information blackout through the cutting off of
electricity, internet, and telecommunications.
In other words, Israels blackout strategy has worked, even with all
the gory images that still manage to make their way to your screens.
The relative scale of the killing has prompted the world to recognize
that a genocide is unfolding, but the horrific character of Israels
crimes and the abject inhumanity of the armys conduct still remain
largely unknown to most of the world.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/01/the-shocking-inhumanity-of-israels-crimes-in-gaza/
"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"