 This is Palestine, in your Inbox, Making Sense of the Madness Audio text By Asem al-Jerjawi, a Palestinian writer, activist, and journalist with We Are Not Numbers and the 16th October Media Group. It was 4am on Friday, October 13, 2023 and I was asleep together with my mom and three brothers in our home in Al-Rimal, Gaza City. We had gathered in one room to sleep because the sound of warplanes buzzing overhead had become relentless, too petrifying for any of us to bear on our own. An unfamiliar number flashed on my mother’s phone. It was a pre-recorded warning from the Israeli military. Our home was in the danger zone and we were ordered to move south. We awoke in horror and ran outside, only to see Israeli army leaflets everywhere. We had no other choice but to flee. We decided to go to a friend’s home in Deir al-Balah. We were only able to bring a few pieces of clothes, blankets and some bedding. We waited for nearly an hour but couldn’t find any means of transportation as everyone was rushing to leave. Finally, our neighbor, Robin Al Mazlom, approached us and said he could take us south in his truck. Alhamdulillah. Robin dropped us off at Wadi Gaza Street. We continued on foot for another 2 kilometers, carrying our bags, blankets and bedding on our backs. Thousands of displaced people were walking with their families south, everyone carrying their life’s possessions on their backs. This must have been what it was like during the Nakba of 1948, with one key difference: we have no illusions anymore about Israel’s ultimate aim: our annihilation. Dozens of friends, uncles, aunts, cousins and my little old grandmother were already sheltering at our friend’s house in al-Zawaida by the time we arrived. 47 of us in a single apartment. For 2 months, I slept on the floor, catching a cold and waking up every day with back pain. Oh, the good old days, when it was a common cold and common back pain that afflicted me. The house was right near Salah ad-Din street, a major traffic artery now completely empty. At least we had easy access to an escape route, if necessary. The day was January 5, 2024 and we were sitting at home. As the afternoon hours passed, the sounds of whistling snipers and gunshots grew louder. Then came the artillery shells and bombs. I don’t know whether it was a 1,000lb bomb or a 2,000lb bomb that Israel dropped near us, but it shattered all of the windows of the house. It felt as if the fighting was outside our front door for three straight days, the most miserable three days of my life. The Israeli army soon declared this area a military zone as well, forcing us all to flee. Again. We packed our clothes, blankets and bedding, and together with our cats, we were off. My grandmother is old and frail and could not keep up, but we had no choice but to move south. I told my family to move ahead to Deir al-Balah, and I would help my grandmother, holding her hand tight, helping her walk, as sniper shots, artillery fire and missiles landed around us in every direction. As we walked south, I saw the body of a toddler girl. Her eyes were missing and all I could see was dried blood flowing from her empty sockets. There were bodies without limbs and human bones strewn around. Animals had clearly devoured their corpses. I felt horror. Anger. We reached our new home in Deir al-Balah, an 8-person tent. There were hardly any provisions nearby, just thousands and thousands of people in every direction. As I ventured out to buy provisions for my family, I noticed a large crowd outside the Green Cafe in Deir al-Balah. So many desperate people, so little food. We were five people, and for two days, we shared a small amount of tainted water and a single loaf of bread. We were weak and hungry. This was my first experience with starvation. Then we received word that Robin, our neighbor who had generously given us a ride south in his truck, had been martyred along with his two sons. Allah Yarhamhum. All I hoped for at that moment was to return to normal life. But life was anything but normal. In addition to the weakness and hunger, we were also exhausted from the sleepless nights. At night I am awoken seven times, sometimes more. It is impossible to sleep amidst the deafening sounds of rockets, bombs, tanks, bulldozers and heavy-arms fire. The rain and the cold are also unbearable. Rain drips through the gaps in our tent’s nylon roof. I go days at a time without getting any sleep at all. Not because I’m not tired, but because our tent was soaking wet. How can one sleep in a pool of freezing water in the freezing cold? Meanwhile, whenever I try to think, to take my mind away from our plight, Palestinian souls flash before my eyes in the shape of a long beard that has lost its head, limbs, legs and eyeballs. I’ve never felt as hopeless as I feel now. My life consists of a constant search for water, bread and firewood, just to have a single meal. I’ve already survived five wars in 2008-9, 2012, 2014, 2018-19 and 2021, but I’m not sure if I’ll survive this one. I was raised in Gaza, I’ve planted all my memories here in Gaza. This is where I belong, in Gaza. Whatever happens to me, my memories will live on here in Gaza. |
JUAN COLE 03/31/2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – US Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI), a former pastor, called this week for a genocide, the Final Solution of the Palestinian Problem..
Michigan’s 5th congressional district stretches across the far bottom of the state, encompassing cities such as Albion and Jackson and abutting Ohio and Indiana. I don’t have any reason to think that the district is full of merciless psychopaths and mass murderers. Jackson has a famous ice cream shop, The Parlour, where the portions are to say the least generous, and which is pleasant to visit on a hot summer day. The district has a population of 768,000 and a median household income of $64,000 (for the US as a whole it is $74,580). It is about 85% white, with Hispanics, African Americans and mixed-race persons making up most of the other 15%. It has voted for a Democratic president in every election in this century and even favored Hilary Clinton over Trump. That Walberg represents this district demonstrates the axiom that Americans buy peanut butter more intelligently than they vote.
That is, the district is represented in Congress by a cruel would-be mass murderer. His soul lacks any hint of the milk of human kindness. Walberg, a fundamentalist former Christian pastor, once ran the homophobic, far right Moody Bible Institute in Chicago while supposedly representing a Michigan district, Walberg is against everything— a woman’s right to choose, the Affordable Care Act, gay marriage, and any attempt to counter the climate crisis. He went to Uganda to voice support for that country’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, which prescribes executions for gay people.
So genocidal tendencies were already apparent. Some 14 million American adults identify as LGBT in polling and apparently Rep. Walberg would happily see them all murdered. It should be remembered that some 90,000 gay men were rounded up in Nazi Germany, with as many as 15,000 sent to death camps, where perhaps 60% were killed. The only difference between Walberg and Heinrich Himmler, who created the Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion, is that Walberg hasn’t yet found a way to implement his sadistic dreams.
At a meeting in Dundee with constituents on March 25, Walberg said that President Biden had spoken of our need to get aid into Gaza. He said, “I don’t think we should. I don’t think any of our aid that goes to Israel, to support our greatest ally, arguably maybe in the world, to the feet of Hamas, and Iran, and Russia. Probably North Korea is in there and China, too — with them, helping Hamas. We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.”
“Nuking Gaza,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3 / IbisPaint, 2024.
Unfortunately for Walberg, who likely talks like this all the time with his inner circle of fellow sociopaths, his remarks were recorded.
It is worth noting the bizarre conspiracy theory that any US aid money sent to Gaza would somehow benefit Russia, China and North Korea or that those three countries back Hamas. I might once have called such paranoid fever dreams abnormal, but I see them and their like normalized all around me these days.
The 2.2 million Gaza noncombatants cannot be blamed for the actions of a small Hamas guerrilla group. These civilians are in imminent danger of mass starvation and some are already dying of hunger. Half of them are children. Most of the rest are women and noncombatant men. Some 70% of them are in Gaza because Zionist gangs chased them out of their homes in 1948 in what became southern Israel, and made them stateless refugees. Now they are being killed on a scale unseen in any conflict in this century.
And, again, mass starvation was a key Nazi technique of war.
the News
Palestinian woman reacts as she cradles a wounded boy after Israeli bombardment in central Gaza City, last week. Credit: AFP
Mar 28, 2024 11:58 pm IST
UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, released a report this week claiming that the nature and scope of attacks by Israeli Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip, as well as the ruinous living conditions created there by Israel, “can only be interpreted as constituting prima facie evidence of an intention to systematically destroy the Palestinians as a group.”
One Israeli told me he believes there is no need for such explosive terminology, while another asked whether there was any proof of these claims.
A woman who, until October 7 was affiliated with the left wing and has since sobered up, or awakened, had somehow seen – from beyond the Israeli iron curtain – a photograph of a Gazan child who was all skin and bones. She told me: “If these images are true, we must see them.”
- Israel’s war on Hamas must not turn into a second Palestinian Nakba
- Gaza’s strawberry harvest, once a symbol of abundance, is another victim of the war
- The nine-year-old Palestinian girl bringing Gazans’ struggles to social media amid war
So Israelis may wonder, raise questions, doubt, downplay or revoke Palestinians and their tragedy, even when it is clear as day, published in a United Nations report, or broadcast live on a non-Israeli news channel. I recalled how back after October 7, Palestinians and others were forbidden from asking questions, from questioning “facts” or from asking for proof.
It is well known that claims by the Israeli side are viewed as gospel, and that whoever rejects them is an antisemitic supporter of Hamas. But when it happens on the Palestinian side, all claims are an exaggeration, a conspiracy, fake-news, and Israelis can and are even obligated to ask about their authenticity.
It is interesting just how important is it to ask whether the photographs are real, or whether these claims are supported by any shred of proof, when there is an abundance of evidence of children dying of malnutrition in Gaza.
This doubt that is cast on every Palestinian image, or video, or report, is part of the Israeli iron curtain, with the underlying assumption that all Palestinians are liars.
It is gaslighting of tremendous proportions that Israelis are inflicting upon themselves and on Palestinians, in order to go on ignoring the genocide the entire world has been continually warning about. Israelis refuse to see or listen, and are still convinced that everything is all right.
Israelis are addicted to the iron curtain, and this practice of denying reality is deeply embedded into the Israeli DNA. It is an integral part of the knotted problems Israelis bring upon themselves through their arrogance and boastfulness.
This denial of reality is present at almost every aspect. Are most Israelis aware, for example, that at the core of the current negotiations between Israel and Hamas, or rather at the core of lack of progress in these negotiations, lies the refugee problem? Israel does not want to allow evacuated Palestinians to return to the northern area of the Gaza Strip.
Are Israelis asking themselves what the purpose of permanently uprooting them from the north is and of leaving the area under Israel’s control? That perhaps Israel wants an ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, to be accompanied by establishing settlements just like in the West Bank, which would lead to the same inescapable state of constant warfare and the destruction of relationships with Palestinians everywhere?
From beyond the Israeli iron curtain, reality seems to most Israelis to be essentially good. However, the more they go on looking from behind that iron curtain, so will their distance from reality continue growing, until the inevitable fall into the gaping chasm. Will they still be able to break that curtain?
March 27, 2024 | Read Online Source : Palestine Nexus
Heba Almaqadma
It was the evening of Oct. 10, 2023. My family and I were sitting in our home in the Al-Tawam neighborhood of north Gaza. That night, we were trying to find peace of mind, worried about what the future had in store for us.
All of a sudden, bombs started raining from the sky. The windows of our home all shattered as glass, rocks, and concrete went flying everywhere. We lost electricity as smoke and debris filled our home, reducing visibility to zero. We ran to the basement, fearing the next bomb was for us.
That’s when I realized our lives would never be the same again. As we sat in the basement, we looked at each other in silence. My whole family was trembling in fear. Little did we know, a genocide was awaiting us.
If only I had known to plan for a genocide, I would have cherished those last moments at home, my last night in a bed, my last morning coffee, my last kibbe dipped in hummus, my last day at work, my last laugh, my last birthday celebration, my last everything. If only I had known, I would have packed up a few of those memories with me.
But I didn’t have a chance to do that, because we decided to evacuate immediately. That’s one of the horrible things we have to do all the time: Try to guess the least worst option among terrible options.
But we decided to evacuate. My family of 10 squeezed into our car, kids on top of adults. Within a few seconds, there was another massive explosion in front of us.
The next thing I can remember, blood was everywhere in the car. I grabbed my 9 year old brother, Adam, who is handicapped, and I held him tightly.
I still remember the sound of my mom’s voice at that moment. “Adam is dead Heba, I can’t feel him!” she said. I looked at Adam, and told her that he was okay, that he was just in shock. We were all shocked. Somehow, we survived.
I held Adam as we got out of the car and started running back home. My dad was in front of me, the rest of my family was behind me. Who was I supposed to look after?
Adam was too scared to be left alone even for a few seconds, and so I couldn’t leave him. I could feel my hands going numb from holding him so tight. “Dad,” I said. “Help me, I can’t hold Adam anymore.”
My Dad shouted: “My finger is cut Heba, I can’t.” I realized my dad’s hand sliced open and blood was gushing everywhere.
Debris littered the streets, almost looking like an earthquake. But it was not an earthquake. It was a bomb sent to kill us. Maybe it was a dumb bomb, an imprecise bomb, that can land 100 feet away from its target. Half the bombs Israel sends to kill us are dumb bombs.
Israel exports sophisticated military technology to the world, but when it comes to us Palestinians in Gaza, the latest technology is not needed, since Israel’s “focus is on (creating) damage, not on precision.” That’s what an Israeli army spokesperson said on Oct. 10th, 2023, the same day Israel bombed our home.
We rushed to our neighbors house hoping and praying they were home. Their son is a nurse and treated my dad while we waited for an ambulance. Hours passed with no ambulance. We later found out that two of the ambulances that tried to reach us were bombed. Eventually, an ambulance arrived, al-hamdullilah.
We sheltered at al-Shifa hospital while my family was being treated. My 1-year old niece, Sarah, needed stitches in her head and hand. She was in so much shock she couldn’t even cry. My brother Mohammed had a splint in his head, and needed surgery, which we were eventually able to get for him 76 days later. My dad’s hand was so badly wounded the doctors thought they might have to amputate it. But thank god, we cared for it, and cleaned it every day, and he still has his hand.
We took refuge in al-Shifa hospital for a month. We barely had anywhere to sleep and we did not have access to clean water. Every day, hundreds of people would arrive at the hospital, some severely injured, some already dead. The agony of the families of the victims was too much too bare. The only thing I can remember now from al-Shifa was the never ending screams of pain that filled the hallways of the hospital.
Then, we were forced to move to the south, to Khan Younis. We made the dangerous journey on foot. For the first time, I felt what my grandparents must have felt during the Nakba in 1948. I understood why they kept the keys to their homes. Those keys were filled with memories.
We stayed in Khan Younes for 24 days, where we had almost nothing. We had no gas for cooking, no electricity, no means of transportation and no safe place to shelter in. We were among the lucky ones just to be able to take a shower. Then, we were ordered by the Israeli military to leave. We moved again, this time to Rafah.
As I walk through the streets of Rafah today, all I see is fear. The fear of life and the fear of death. We are living in fear every moment of the day. We now also fear that we will never have our lives back.
In this war, who am I? To the world, it seems I am just a number. A person who is counted on a list of people displaced, people injured or people hungry and thirsty. And if the next bomb is for me, I will be another number to add to the number of people killed in the genocide, and then I will be forgotten.
| March 22, 2024 | Read Online |
 Zachary Foster |
 Meet the Palestinian Hostages Taken by Israel, Known as “Administrative Detainees”Meet Omar al-Khatib, a research partner at The Institute of Development Studies, affiliated with the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. Omar al-Khatib, a Palestinian hostage abducted by Israel (source)On 1 March 2024, Omar was taken hostage by Israel. He was not charged with anything. He was not told why he was taken to prison, nor why his imprisonment could be renewed forever.Omar’s colleagues described him as empathic, passionate and brilliant. Omar was robbed of his freedom and will likely be subjected to untold abuses such as harassment, assault, solitary confinement, torture, sexual abuse or possibly worse: at least 7 Palestinian prisoners have mysteriously “died” in Israel’s custody since Oct. 7th. So why was Omar taken hostage? In all likelihood, he will be leveraged as a bargaining chip in hostage negotiations with Hamas. In other words, he was taken for the same reason that Hamas took Israeli civilians hostage on Oct. 7th, as leverage in a prisoner swap. But there is at least one key difference between Israel’s actions and Hamas’s actions: Hamas took a few hundred civilians hostage on Oct. 7th, while Israel has taken 3,558 civilians hostage, and continues to take more hostages every day.In fact, the 3,558 Palestinians taken hostage includes only those known as “administrative detainees,” the term Israel uses to whitewash its policy of hostage taking. [This figure does not include an additional 5,519 Palestinian prisoners, classified as “Security Prisoners”, “Security Detainees” or “Unlawful Combatants”] The phrase “administrative detainee” typifies the sanitizing language that has become a hallmark of Western media coverage of Israel’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza. Palestinians aren’t killed, but they do seem to die a lot; they aren’t attacked, although there are a lot of explosions, and they definitely aren’t hostages, they are administrative detainees.Meet Diala Ayesh, a Palestinian human rights lawyer. On Jan. 17th, Israel took Diala hostage.  Diala Ayesh, a Palestinian hostage abducted by Israel (source)Much like Omar, Diala was not charged with anything nor told why she was taken to prison, nor explained why she could be imprisoned forever without ever getting an answer about what she did wrong.“Whenever I cry at night in bed…I try to remember how extremely strong she is,” her 26-year-old sister, Aseel, told Al Jazeera. Diala’s abduction appears to have been designed to maximize the number of Palestinian lives destroyed via “administrative detention.” That’s because Diala was herself a lawyer defending the rights of other Palestinians abducted by Israel. In fact, she not only defended Palestinian abductees, she was training other lawyers in how to defend Palestinian administrative detainees in Israel’s military courts. For Israel, if there are fewer lawyers to defend the Palestinian hostages, and fewer lawyers to train other lawyers to defend the Palestinian hostages, there will be fewer impediments to taking more Palestinians hostage.Israel’s policy of abducting Palestinians, unsurprisingly, goes back many decades:  Source: B’tselem Today, Israel is currently holding 3X more Palestinian hostages than at any point in the past two decades, a policy that relies on a simple principle. If you are an Israeli living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, you are entitled to due process, but if you are a Palestinian living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, you are not entitled to due process.No surprise that this what-the-fuck policy has triggered the most visceral and self-sacrificial form of resistance: hunger strikes.For decades, Palestinians denied basic due process have been at the forefront of the hunger protests. In May 2023, Khader Adnan died in his prison cell after he went on a hunger strike protesting his imprisonment. Adnan had been arrested at least 12 times in the past and spent around eight years in prison, mostly in “administrative detention.” This was the fifth and final time he was to go on a hunger strike.In Dec. 2021, Israel abducted Khalil Awawdeh, a Palestinian father of four who went on a six-month hunger strike in 2022 until Israel agreed to release him–pressing no further charges against him.It’s time to regard Israel’s policy of hostage taking for what it is, hostage taking. |
Violent abuse, humiliation, appalling overcrowding, cold and barren cells, shackles for days on end. A Palestinian who spent three months in Israeli administrative detention amid the Gaza war describes his experience at Ofer Prison
Amira, at home in the Aida camp this week, after release from Ofer Prison. “I was in Ofer before, but it was never like this.”Credit: Alex Levac Gideon LevyAlex Levac
Mar 23, 2024 5:31 am IST
Munther Amira has been released from “Guantanamo.” He’d already been arrested a few times in the past, but what he experienced during incarceration in an Israeli prison during the Gaza war is unlike anything he has ever gone through. A friend who spent 10 years in an Israeli prison told him that the impact of his own incarceration during the past three months was the equivalent of 10 years in jail during more normal times.
The detailed testimony we heard this week from Amira in his home in the Aida refugee camp, in Bethlehem, was shocking. He expressed his ordeal with his body, kneeling on the floor repeatedly, describing things in minute detail, without any feeling, until the words became unbearable. It was impossible to go on listening to the harrowing descriptions.
But it seemed as though he had been waiting for the opportunity to relate what he endured in an Israeli prison over the past several months. The descriptions poured from him in an unbroken flow – horror heaped on horror, humiliation after humiliation – as he described the hell he had been put through, in fluent English interspersed with Hebrew prison terminology. Over three months, he had lost 33 kilos (73 pounds).
There are two large pictures in his living room. One is of his friend Nasser Abu Srour, who has been imprisoned for 32 years for murdering a Shin Bet security service agent; the other is of him on the day of his release, exactly two weeks ago. This week Amira appeared to be physically and mentally resilient, looking like a different person than he did on the day he left prison.
Amira is 53, married and a father of five; he was born in this refugee camp, whose population includes descendants of the residents of 27 destroyed Palestinian villages. He designed the large key of return that hangs from the camp’s entry gate and bears the inscription, “Not for sale.” Amira is a political activist who believes in a nonviolent struggle, a principle he still holds even after the enormous number of deaths in Gaza in the war, he emphasizes. He is a member of Fatah who works in the Palestinian Authority’s Office for Settlements and the Fence, and a graduate of the social sciences faculty of Bethlehem University.
December 18, 2023, 1 A.M. Loud noises. Amira looks out the window and sees Israeli soldiers hitting his younger brother Karim, who is 40. The troops drag Karim up to the second floor, to Amira’s apartment, and throw him down in the middle of the living room. Amira says his brother fainted. Karim is the administrative director of the cardiac department in Al-Jumaya al-Arabiya Hospital in Bethlehem, and he’s not accustomed to this sort of violence.
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The room was packed with soldiers, dozens perhaps. Amira’s daughter, Yomana, was standing behind him. The officer said, “Take her,” and Amira’s heart skipped a beat. Had they come to arrest his 18-year-old student daughter? What was her transgression? The soldiers then bound his 13-year-old son Mohammed and his son Ghassan, who’s 22. Mohammed was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a map of the whole of Palestine – soldiers tore it off him.
Amira didn’t understand what was happening. The soldiers took his picture and sent it to wherever they sent it. “It’s him,” he heard them say afterward. He was bound and taken to a military base, where he was thrown onto the floor and kicked by soldiers, he relates. About an hour later, he was taken back home. He was blindfolded, but in the dark he heard Yomana shouting “I love you.” That fleeting, sweet moment would accompany him during the next three months in prison. He replied, “I love you, and don’t be afraid.” For that he was punished, but at least he felt calmer, knowing that Yomana had not been arrested.
He was again taken away and thrown into a military vehicle, where he was stepped on kicked by soldiers incessantly. He’s the age of the fathers of many of those same soldiers. He was then placed in the trunk of the car, and they started to move. After about half an hour, they reached a military base, where he was left outside on a cold winter night. The soldiers spoke among themselves about Gaza. One of them said to him, “Today we will fulfill your dream. You wanted to be a shahid [religious martyr]? We will send you to Gaza.” Amira shuddered, and answered, “I want to live, not die.” He was afraid that the troops would do what they threatened and already imagined his death in Gaza.
Morning came and he found himself in the Etzion detention center. “Now the show begins,” the soldiers said. Amira was taken into an office, where the handcuffs, which were already leaving blue bruises on his wrists, were removed, and he was ordered to strip. When he got to his underpants, he refused to continue. The soldiers kicked him and he fell to the ground. “Suddenly I understood what rape is, what sexual harassment is. They wanted to strip me and take my picture.” He stood naked, the soldiers told him to spread his legs, he felt humiliated as never before in his life. He was afraid that they would post the videos they took. Finally he was taken to a cell.
Supper consisted of a small plate of cream cheese and a slice of bread. But it was the next day’s lunch that truly flabbergasted Amira. Soldiers placed four trays in the four corners of the room, and eight detainees were ordered to kneel and eat off the trays with their hands. The image that came to mind was street cats, he recalls. The food consisted of unrecognizable and inedible mush. He says it was a mixture of leftovers from the soldiers’ meals. He asked what the white part was and was told that it was from an egg. He’s ready to swear that it was not an egg. Amira didn’t touch the food.
The next day he was moved to Ofer Prison, near Ramallah, where he was questioned about a few posts that the interrogators claimed he had uploaded and which he denied. “There is nothing in my Facebook [feed] that supports violence,” he says. The posts included identification with the fate of the residents of Gaza. “‘Mabruk [congratulations],’ the interrogator said. ‘You’re going to administrative detention'” – incarceration without a trial.
That was Amira’s lot for the next three months. He was sentenced to four months in prison, on the basis of no evidence, let alone a trial. “I was in Ofer before, but it was never like this.” The combination of a war during which Palestinians everywhere can be subjected to abuse, and the fact that the Israel Prison Service is under the purview of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, is leaving its mark. Amira decided not to resist anything, in order to survive.
He received a brown prison service uniform, with no underwear and with no connection to his size. Later, he exchanged clothes with another inmate. He had a mattress 5 centimeters (about 2 inches) thick and a wool blanket; he slept with 12 other detainees in a cell designed for five. “That is contrary to a High Court of Justice decision,” he notes. Eight inmates slept on the floor; because of his age he was given the use of a bed.
Amira discovered that he was in Wing 24 of the prison, which is earmarked for problematic detainees. “And I thought I was a good person,” he says with a smile. New prisoners who arrived from Gaza were held in the adjacent wing. He thinks some of them were from Hamas’ Nukhba unit. He will not soon forget their shouts. “People are screaming, people are barking, people are crying, locked up 24 hours a day, blindfolded, and the guards beat them nonstop.”
Not that things were easy in his wing. Five times during the three months, prison service special ops officers employing acute violence raided their cell, each time on a different pretext. The cell didn’t look the way an Ofer cell used to appear: It was completely bare. The television, the electric kettle, the burner, the radio, the books, the pen and paper, the chess, the backgammon – nothing remained, and of course there was no canteen. I came to terms with it, Amira says. This is the price of resistance to the occupation and the war in Gaza.
They assembled a backgammon board using a bread carton, and drew the markings for the game with a solution made from one prisoner’s crushed-up anti-anxiety tablets and water. The pieces were made from eggshells. Then one night, the patrol confiscated the improvised game. Punishment came swiftly. At 6 A.M., the special ops force Keter Ofer showed up with two dogs, and assaulted the inmates. Then they took them to the showers and washed them down in their clothes. The next morning they took away the blankets and mattresses, keeping them until 10 P.M. The cold was brutal.
No coffee, no cigarettes. It was a nightmare for smokers. Sometimes the prisoners would walk by and smoke into the cell to exacerbate their suffering. The aroma of the guards’ coffee also drove the inmates crazy. Two small dishes of jam for 13 prisoners, who fought just to get a taste.
“I counted the seconds,” Amira says, but time seemed to stand still in prison. For the first time he saw an inmate who tried to kill himself by throwing himself from the second floor onto the fence outside. Lately there have been more attempts at suicide in the prison, he says, which goes completely against the ethos of Palestinians who have decided to struggle against the occupation. The inmate who jumped was bleeding, his fellow inmates tried to call for a paramedic. But in Ofer you’re not allowed to call for anyone – so again they were punished. The Keter Ofer squad reappeared and this time made them all lie on the floor and beat them with truncheons. They hit Amira in the testicles, too. That too is sexual assault, in his view. “I said to myself: I am going to die. I have a blood pressure problem, and my heart was pounding. Some of us were bleeding from the nose.”
The eggs that were served were not cooked. A few days later, he decided he would eat everything, in order to survive. On one occasion, when they were taken to “waiting” cells (solitary cells for those about to be transferred), and he was handcuffed for an entire day and night. He had to relieve himself in his pants because he wasn’t able to lower them. “And everything has to do with October 7. Everything I asked for, they said ‘October 7.’ When we asked for the eggs to be cooked, they said: ‘October 7.’ It’s Guantanamo, I tell you.”
The Israel Prison Service spokesperson stated this week in response to an inquiry from Haaretz: “We are not aware of the allegations that are described, and as far as we know they are incorrect. If a proper complaint is submitted, it will be examined by the appropriate persons.”
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit told Haaretz: “The suspect was arrested on December 18, 2023, on suspicion of incitement and activity in a hostile organization. During a hearing in the military court on the military prosecutor’s request to extend his confinement, the suspect raised claims regarding his treatment by the soldiers during his imprisonment. The claims are being clarified.”
Amira was released after three months, a month ahead of schedule. No one told him anything, he was just given clothing supplied by the Red Cross and thought he was being freed as part of a deal (that didn’t happen). He told us in his home this week: “Mahmoud Darwish wrote that the prisoners are the source of hope of the Palestinian people. That is no longer true. It’s the first time that detainees are trying to commit suicide. The first time I felt that the door of the cell is the door of a grave. An Israeli prison is now a graveyard for the living.”
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