The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said that many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are unaware of the fate of their relatives who were detained by the Israeli army, which claims not to arrest or detain them, even though the last time they were seen they were in the hands of soldiers or during their arrest.
In recent months, Palestinians and human rights organizations have submitted 27 petitions to find out the fate of missing persons, most of which were rejected. But in some cases, re-examination led to the discovery that people about whom the army allegedly had no information were in Israeli detention centers or had died.
One of these cases is Abdul Karim Al-Shana, who was arrested in late January 2024 while trying to cross a military checkpoint south of Khan Yunis, after the army ordered residents to evacuate and head to the Al-Mawasi area, which the army classified as a “safe area” despite the continued attacks there.
For 5 months, his family did not hear any news about him and continued to search for him, until news finally came to them through a released prisoner who said he had seen him in the Shakma detention center in Ashkelon, where he was tortured.
The family tried to arrange a visit for a lawyer for him, but they were told by the Prison Service that he was not detained there, but in Ofer Prison. Later, when they contacted the military control center for information, they were informed that there was “no indication” of his arrest or detention.
Denying the arrests
In another case, Haaretz reported that two people, Munir al-Faqoui and his son Yassin, were discovered to have died while in detention after the army claimed that there was “no indication” of their arrest, and an investigation was opened by the military police into their deaths, and is still ongoing.
There is also a Palestinian from Gaza who was detained by the army at the end of May 2024, and when his family asked the army to determine his location, the request was met with a response stating that “there is no indication of arrest or detention.” However, he was released after about two months and said that he was detained throughout that period by the army inside the Strip and transferred from one place to another.
Another case of disappearance is of a father and his 5-year-old daughter from the Al-Ajur family. The mother says the last time she saw them was on March 24 when they were staying in a nearby house near Al-Shifa Hospital in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, after they had been evacuated from the Tal Al-Hawa neighborhood earlier in the war.
She added, “We were under siege for a week, and on the seventh day, soldiers entered our house and started shooting immediately. I was pregnant and was injured in my stomach, my husband was injured in his legs, and my daughter was injured in her shoulder.”
According to the grieving mother, the soldiers took her young daughter to another room to treat her injury. She said, “They pointed their weapons at me and said, ‘You have to leave the house to the south.’ Then I asked them to give me my little son, who is 4 years old, and I left, and since then, I don’t know what happened.” What happened to my husband or my daughter.”
When some family members returned to the house two weeks later, they discovered that it had been bombed, but they did not find any bodies there.
As for the Al-Ajour family, an Israeli army spokesman responded and said, “The described situation is unknown. We confirm that the father was not arrested and did not arrive at army detention centers.” The army declined to comment on other cases or general allegations regarding the difficulty of locating detainees.
Criticisms of human rights organizations
In turn, the Center for the Protection of the Individual (HaMoked) filed 27 petitions to reveal the fate of missing persons, which in some cases led to the army being forced to acknowledge their detention.
However, the Supreme Court rejected many of the petitions, sparking accusations that it was “simply certifying” statements by the military and the prison service without real judicial review.
For her part, the Center’s Executive Director, Jessica Montiel, pointed out that “hundreds of people have disappeared after being detained by the army. Either the army refuses to provide information or does not document dealings with civilians at all, which creates a state of lack of justice.”
Since the beginning of the war, many Gazans have been arrested, some of whom were transferred to detention centers in Israel and others who were detained for periods in the Strip, most of whom were arrested under the “unlawful combatants” law, which currently allows them to be held for 45 days without seeing a lawyer.
For several months, Israel refused to provide any information to the families of detainees about their fate, and at the same time stopped allowing Red Cross representatives to visit detention centers.
