The shocking inhumanity of Israel’s crimes in Gaza

Survivors of Israel’s ground invasion in northern Gaza tell chilling stories of kidnappings, torture, and the rampant use of civilians as bait and human shields. The world still has no idea how inhumane Israel’s genocidal war really has been.

By Tareq S. Hajjaj

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 — he’s 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 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 asked 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, 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 al-Hilou was fleeing with his wife and five children. No one else was with them who could look after them when he was arrested. Al-Hilou says his family suffered immensely during his imprisonment and struggled to find a shelter to 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 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 without a head of household to take care of them, especially since all his children were very young, including his three daughters and two young boys.

When he was first arrested, he didn’t know where he was being taken, but 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 asked 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 simply beat him severely in response. As an older man with graying hair, a short frame, and a fragile build, he was unable to endure the torture techniques of 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 don’t know! I don’t know! I am not a Hamas member! I have nothing to do with resistance. I have nothing to do with military activity. I don’t know where the Hamas leaders are, I don’t know anything about them. Civilians don’t know these things, only leaders do. Normal people don’t know who they are. They’re 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 family’s 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 they’ve been able to find shelter or not, whether they’ve been able to secure food, whether they are even dead or alive. 

Haytham al-Hilou 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 when he was between the ages of 17 and 20, he engaged in activities that were not military in any way but which were supportive of the resistance.

“Maybe Israel wanted to punish me for my youth, years that are behind me and well in the past,” he speculated.

In those youthful years, he and his friends used to participate in activities that showed support for the resistance. And who in all of Palestine doesn’t 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 it 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 Israel’s ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza. Eyad Eleywa is one of the residents of Gaza City who decided to remain and has remained there to this day, while several of his children chose to flee south. They are now in Rafah.

Eleywa remains in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood along with his wife and 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 Sultan’s neighborhood of Rafah. I get to see him every now and again, and each time, he tells me about the most recent time his father has been arrested in northern Gaza.

His 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 weren’t 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 home.

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 father’s account of his treatment while under arrest. “They move from one person to the next, telling each of them, ‘We’re going to send you to your God,’ and ‘We’re going to send you to heaven to marry the virgins.’”

The insults continued for some time. The soldiers want them to fear for their lives and to believe they are moments from being executed.

Horror hidden from the world

Those who have gone through these ordeals and lived to talk about it consider themselves lucky because they were eventually released and returned to their families. Countless others who were arrested at checkpoints remain missing, with no word of where they are or whether they are alive or dead.

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 man’s 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, using thin young men capable of moving with agility in small spaces. The eyewitness said that when soldiers noticed any suspicious movements through the camera fastened to their captive, they blew up the tunnel and the young man along with it. When the tunnel was revealed to lead to a dead end or 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 that they 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, Israel’s 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 Israel’s crimes and the abject inhumanity of the army’s conduct still remain largely unknown to most of the world.

Via Mondoweiss

Please Donate To Support Information Clearing House: We Can’t Do It Without You

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)