Gaza- While Abeer Nasrallah was striving to protect her four children, accompanied by her husband, amid the bitter tragedy of displacement in the northern Gaza Strip, she found herself at an Israeli military checkpoint and what she feared happened.
The soldiers called the adult males (15 years old) and above, including her husband, Naeem, and gathered them into a large pit prepared in advance by giant bulldozers. They ordered the men to take off their clothes, and they began summoning them in groups of five people each. Whenever a group was summoned, Abeer would cling to the hope that her husband would return to meet her and his children.
As time passed, hope began to diminish until Abeer realized that Naim (30 years old) would not return with her, and that she was faced with an unknown reality and fate, without knowing whether he was alive or dead.
Big trap
Naeem works as a seller in a legumes store, and the family lived in the Tal al-Zaatar area of Jabalia camp, before the occupation forces – which began a bloody attack on the northern Gaza Strip at the beginning of this October – forced them to repeatedly migrate.
The aggression resulted in the martyrdom, injury, and displacement of tens of thousands of residents. The occupation forced citizens who were forced to flee by the massacres to cross a checkpoint that turned into a large trap, resulting in the arrest of hundreds.
In a temporary tent inside a shelter that lacks the most basic necessities of life in the center of Gaza City, which she reached after a bitter journey, Abeer sits with her children waiting for news about the fate of her forcibly disappeared husband.
In turn, the child Kawthar Al-Dahnoun (14 years old) remembers well the moment of crossing the Israeli military checkpoint through which they were forced to pass from the northern Gaza Strip towards Gaza City. She told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that her father and uncle were pulling the wheelchair for her paralyzed grandmother on difficult sandy ground, which forced them to throw away their belongings, including bedding and clothes, because they were unable to carry them.
At the checkpoint, the occupation forces arrested her father and uncle, while her grandmother remained there, until she was allowed to pass with her injured grandson, who was able to transport her to Gaza with difficulty. Since then, Kawthar has been living in a tent in Gaza City after she was able to cross, hoping to be reunited with her father and uncle soon.
Her father, Anan Al-Dahnoun (45 years old), works as a lumberjack, a profession that has spread because the occupation has prevented the entry of cooking gas into the northern Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war.
tragedy
Inside a green tent in Gaza City, Fayez Al-Masry (57 years old) sits carrying the burden of the loss of his son Omar (27 years old), who was arrested by the occupation at the checkpoint while trying to escape from the hell of the occupation in northern Gaza. His tragedy began when his family was displaced from Beit Hanoun, in the far north of the Strip, to Jabalia camp in search of safety.
But the Israeli aggression did not leave them room to rest, as they moved from one shelter center to another until they reached Al Fakhoura School.
Al-Masry told Al-Jazeera Net, “The occupation came and took the women to the Kuwait School and us to a hole, then we crossed the checkpoint set up at the Indonesian Hospital.” After crossing, he discovered that the occupation had arrested a number of citizens, including his son. He recalls, “They put us in a large pit that was filled with waste. We were subjected to severe insults and very obscene words full of gloating. We were waiting for them to kill us. We did not know what they wanted.”
In his new shelter, Fayez’s heart is filled with concern over the fate of his son Omar, knowing the torture and harsh treatment that Palestinian detainees are subjected to inside the occupation prisons.
In the places where residents of the northern Gaza Strip have taken refuge, hardly a displaced family is devoid of a detainee who was kidnapped by the occupation soldiers from among his family at the checkpoint.
Hani Al-Derini tells his bitter story with the checkpoint after the soldiers arrested 3 of his cousins, Osama, Ramzi, and Musa. He lived moments of terror after being trapped in the “Beit Lahia Project” area for 15 days, amid continuous bombardment.
Forced disappearance
As for Hussein Nabhan, who witnessed the arrest of 10 members of his family, he recounts the details of the tragedy he experienced, and told Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “They forced us to take off our clothes, and small planes (quadcopters) entered upon us, asking us to surrender ourselves, and we were taken to the checkpoint.” He speaks bitterly about the arrest of his family members, and explains that among them are two children, Ibrahim (17 years old) and Yasser (15 years old).
Rami Abdo, head of the Euro-Mediterranean Observatory for Human Rights, says that the circumstances of the aggression did not make it possible to accurately count the number of detainees, especially since Israel practices forced disappearance during the war and does not provide any information about its prisoners. But he explained – to Tel Aviv Tribune Net – that the number of detainees in the northern Gaza Strip since the fifth of October (that is, since the start of the last attack on these areas) is no less than 600 detainees.
Abdo pointed out that the occupation forces – in their ongoing aggression in the northern Gaza Strip – repeatedly used the method of the large pit in which detainees, whether men, women or children, are held for hours before or after they are taken for investigation and initial examination, as a form of insult and intimidation.
According to him, the Observatory documented many cases in which the occupation army used Palestinian civilians as human shields. One form of this method is forcing the detainee to wear an army uniform, placing a camera on his head, and forcing him to carry out inspection missions or enter homes and tunnels before Israeli soldiers reach them.
Abdo said that his human rights organization estimates that 10,000 Palestinians have been arrested in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war, including about 4,000 workers who were released in batches.
Regarding the total number of detainees so far, he stated that it is unknown, given the occupation’s use of forced disappearance and its refusal to disclose information about them. He explained that the released detainees revealed “the horrors of torture to which they were subjected, which reached the point of killing dozens of them.”
Abdo added that the Euro-Mediterranean Observatory documented “the killing of at least 60 prisoners, some of them on the first day of detention, including at least two doctors.”
