Tuesday 9 April 2024
This Tuesday morning there was a new face among the neighbours come to hear the news, a young man around thirty. He had just been released by the Israelis. I’ll call him Mohammad because he doesn’t want to be identified. He is one of the 16,000 Gazans who were allowed to work in Israel before the October events.
He told me his story. As he spoke, he would occasionally stop for a few seconds with tears in his eyes. When I looked at his hands, he had bloody scars on his wrists. He said: “They tighten their plastic handcuffs until you bleed.” He had the same marks on his ankles.
Mohamed wants people to hear his story. Here it is, in his own words.
I was working in Israel, in Acre, since September 2022, with a company making electrical poles. I got that job through a go-between, a kanlan as they’re called in Hebrew. As is often the case, he was an Israeli Palestinian. The Israeli employer paid him and it was he who paid me my wages, taking a commission on the way.
I earned 350 shekels (€87) a day. I stayed in Israel for six months, the duration of my work permit. Then I would come back and spend a few days in Gaza. In the meantime my work permit would be renewed and I would go back. I would have preferred not to make so many round trips to save as much money as I could and also because each time I went back there, the Israelis might not renew my permit.
“Suddenly we heard somebody speaking Hebrew”
I returned to Israel on 5 October. On the 7 th, the Israeli boss told me and other workers from Gaza that we had to stop working. He called in the go-between who took us to Ramallah in the West Bank. There he said to us, “You’re in Palestinian territory now, you’re on your own.” At first we were made welcome, people showed solidarity. We stayed in Ramallah for about three weeks. Then the Palestinian Preventive Security forces came for us. They told us they didn’t want us staying in Ramallah and that they were going to take us to Jericho. We didn’t want to go there because we were afraid of being locked up in a camp for Palestinian refugees or arrested by the Israeli army at one of their many checkpoints.
So we ran away. What could we do? Find refuge in Jordan? We would have had to pay $8,000 to traffickers, and I didn’t have enough. At that point we learned that the Israelis were rounding up all the Gazans in the West Bank. People were afraid to help us. In the end I went to the home of a friend of my family, at Qalqiliya[[West Bank city northwest of Ramallah.]. I stayed there for almost four months. They hid me with two other workers from Gaza in an apartment block garage. My friends locked the door from the outside to give the impression there was no one inside. But we were given away, probably by a Palestinian collaborator who told the army there were three people in the garage. Suddenly we heard a bunch of cars arriving and men speaking Hebrew. And we realised they had come for us.
“They ordered us to strip completely”
The Israeli soldiers broke down the door, but they couldn’t find us. We stayed motionless and there was no light in the garage. They were about to leave when we heard someone say, in Arabic: “Come back, I tell you they’re in there.” And then they found us. Right away they kicked and punched us and hit us with M16 rifle butts. Then they ordered us to strip off completely.
Again they began beating us all over our bodies and I was afraid for my two companions who are both over 60. I’m not really fluent in Hebrew, so I said to them in Arabic: “Why are you hitting us like this?” Their only reply was : “Shut up and don’t move!” Next, they blindfolded us and tied our hands and feet with plastic handcuffs.
They were so tight I thought my hands and feet were going to drop off. Then they dragged us over the ground like sheep, because with those cuffs, we couldn’t walk. They threw us into a bus or a jeep, I don’t know which, we were still blindfolded. And there it was the same thing, they kept hitting us all over our bodies. I couldn’t stand any more, I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was about to die.
“I want to humiliate you so you’ll remember it all your life”
I don’t know where they took us. We were wearing only our underpants. They put us in a kind of cabin and took off the cuffs and the blindfolds. A man said in Arabic: “Get undressed!” I didn’t have anything on but my underpants. He told me to drop my underpants and turn around. He filmed me from behind, stark naked. I shouted: “So what do you want? Why are you doing this? You want to kill me? Go ahead!” He answered: “No, I don’t want to kill you. I want to humiliate you so you’ll remember it the rest of your life. Never forget these moments”. Next they blindfolded us again and cuffed our wrists, very tight like before. Some time later they put us on a bus. It made several stops and each time they made us get off in a different place and beat us. All of that lasted a whole day. At the last stop, there were several tanks parked in a circle, forming a kind of prison. They made us kneel on gravel. And began their interrogation: “What kind of work did you do? How did you get your permit? Where did you work?” The gravel dug into our knees and felt like knives. In that same place we heard people screaming, mostly women: “Stop, don’t pull my nails! Stop, not my hair!” We heard people being tortured night and day.
“Go on, shoot. I want to die”
They gave us just a piece of cheese - the processed, Dairylea kind - and that was all, plus a tiny bottle of water for five people. After the torture, they let us sleep, still in our underpants, wrists cuffed behind our backs, ankles cuffed too. We slept on the gravel, it was like sleeping on a bed of cactus. If we tried to change positions, a soldier would come and kick us, because we had our hands attached behind us. After that, they stood me up against a wall, hands over my head, for nearly twelve hours. We weren’t allowed to lower our arms. Soldiers came and insulted us. There was no more morality, no more decency. They began to touch us up. I said to them: “Go on, shoot, finish the job. I want to die.”
A soldier answered: “I’m not like you, I’m fair. If I gave you a pistol right now, you’d shoot me because you want to kill me. But me, I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to humiliate you so you’ll never forget it.” That’s worse than killing someone. Afterwards there was another interrogation. Two soldiers, a man and a woman, asked us: “Is there anything wrong with you?” I answered: “No, except that I can’t breathe, all my bones feel broken and my hands are bleeding”. They gave us medicaments but I didn’t want to take them because I didn’t know what was in them. I’d heard there were people who’d lost their memory or begun having hallucinations.
“I said to myself, OK, this is the end”
They told me to sign a paper in Hebrew which I couldn’t read and while I was blindfolded. I refused. They said to me: “You don’t have a choice, you’re going to sign right now.” They beat me until I agreed to sign. I don’t know what I signed.
For several days, or maybe a week - I can’t remember - they kept us in another place of detention, a villa. They removed the blindfold and for the first time I saw a little daylight and the people around me. They also removed the handcuffs and I saw how my arms were almost severed at the wrists; and it was the same for my legs.
Later they put back the handcuffs and the blindfolds and made us get into buses again. There were maybe fifty of us. They said they were taking us to Kerem Shalom, a crossing point between Israel and the Gaza strip; I figured they were actually going to execute us. I said to myself, "OK, this is the end”. It was always like that, after the torture they wanted to do away with the witnesses.
But they really did take us to Kerem Shalom. When we got there, I saw soldiers and tanks everywhere. They took off the handcuffs and the blindfolds and told us: “Don’t look back, just walk straight ahead. Don’t turn left or right, straight ahead.” I said to myself they were going to shoot us in the back, they were going to get a kick out of shooting us like ducks, the way they always do. I was terrified.
“Blind revenge on every Palestinian man and woman”
We walked for an hour and a half or two hours. Finally we saw the UN tents set up by Kerem Shalom. And I knew we were saved. The UN personnel told us to ring our families but the Israelis had confiscated all our mobiles. Many people around me had forgotten their families’ phone number, forgotten where they lived, on account of the torture or the pills they’d been made to take. The Israelis had also confiscated all our money. From me they’d taken the 13,000 shekels ($3250) I’d earned working in Israel.
I’ve been back in Rafah with my family. Ever since then I’ve felt like an animal that was driven out of the slaughterhouse. I can’t sleep at night. Doctors gave me tranquillizers and sleeping pills. But whenever I shut my eyes, I see it all again: the arrest, the torture and above all the soldiers’ maltreatments when I was naked. I begged them several times to kill me rather than suffer that humiliation, I really wanted them to execute me, kill me right away rather than go through all that. When we reached the UN tents, I talked to the fifty or so people with me. They told me horrible things, especially the women.
I realised we were dealing with blind revenge on each and every Palestinian man or woman.
I’m 34, I’m married, I have a daughter of ten and a son of six. I was happy to see them again. But at the same time the dream I had for them by working, saving up, building a home for them and giving them a better life, it was all gone. I know now, with everything that has happened, I won’t be going back to work in Israel. There won’t be any work. I don’t know what to do in Gaza. I feel I’m a burden on my parents and especially to my father. He’s the one who feeds us now, me and my children. Now, with the war, there’s nothing to eat and I haven’t any savings. They’ve all been spent and I don’t know what to do.
I decided to speak out because I want people to know what we’ve been through. We had nothing to do with everything that happened. On the contrary, we worked with Israelis, we had Israeli friends, we ate together with the boss. We celebrated the Jewish holidays with them. And all of a sudden the same Israeli who treated me as a friend saw me as an animal to be tortured or killed.
Translated by Noël Burch.