RAMALLAH: After a week’s captivity in an Israeli military camp, where he said he was blindfolded and handcuffed, given little food and water, held outdoors for three days and then confined under a crowded, open-sided tent, Mohammed Ibrahim walked home on Saturday with 75 other haggard detainees through the deserted streets here.
At one point Israeli soldiers fired warning shots toward the group, he said. After negotiations between one of the Palestinians and a soldier, the men won permission to pass in groups of five, holding up their shirts to reveal that their bodies did not carry explosive belts, the weapon of choice for suicide bombers. “Coming home is a victory. Coming home under a white flag is not a good way, but we are weak,” said Ibrahim, an electrical engineering student.
For hundreds of Palestinians like Ibrahim who have been detained and processed through the nearby Ofer military base, the worst seems over for now. Some detainees here - how many is unknown - have been ferried to jails in Israel. Israeli officials say that in all the West Bank, 1,200 Palestinians have been detained and 200 identified as “terrorist suspects.”
The breadth of the detentions speaks to the size of Israel’s ambitions here, but also to the difficulty of its goals of ”uprooting terrorism.” Released prisoners said they were surprised by the lack of systematic interrogations, if not by what they described as the deep hostility of their captors.
Ibrahim said he turned himself in to Israeli soldiers on March 30 at the Diaspora School in El Bireh, a twin city adjacent to this city. Troops had broadcast orders over loudspeakers for males between the ages of 15 and 45 to gather at the school. Israeli soldiers herded many of them into buses and took them to Ofer, a military base northeast of Ramallah. There they were blindfolded and handcuffed, and kept seated in the dirt in the rain until a brief interrogation three days later.
“They only asked my name, birth and personal questions,” Ibrahim said. “I had nothing to hide. I belong to no political group.” After questioning, detainees were placed under a tent and given blankets and wood pallets to sleep on. There was a single toilet for several hundred men. Finally, a bus took them to the Kalandia refugee camp, near the checkpoint that separates this city from neighbourhoods north of Al Quds. They took refuge in a United Nations school. Saturday, one group decided to brave the curfew and walk home under the white flag. Ibrahim’s parents and 25 residents of their apartment building greeted him with hugs and shouts of joy.
“I missed my family,” Ibrahim said. “We called the Red Cross. They said they could do nothing. We decided to go anyway.” Besides the roundup at the school, Israeli troops have seized Palestinians from homes and offices and taken them to Ofer. Thursday, soldiers raided the Red Crescent Hospital and ordered all the doctors and nurses to gather in the lobby while they searched the building.
The soldiers detained two Red Crescent physicians, two nurses and a laundry worker and transported them to Ofer, witnesses said. The detainees were blindfolded and handcuffed at the hospital. “It was like being raped,” said Mohammed Najjar, one of the detained physicians. “They have to show they are making progress, so they pick up anyone they can.”
On the way to Ofer, the prisoners were taken to the settlement of Psagot. The soldiers cursed them, Najjar said. At Psagot, they stood five hours in the rain before moving by bus to Ofer. There, an interrogator asked Najjar if he was trained by the Palestine Liberation Organization, if he belonged to any political organizations and what his relatives did for a living. ”They didn’t have any names on any list, they didn’t ask me if I knew anyone in particular,” he said.
Najjar said that at one point, prisoners protested the diet of cucumbers, yogurt and an apple, to be shared among six men whose hands were kept bound. The soldiers threatened to tear-gas them, he said. “My hands are still cold from the handcuffs. I asked the guards once to loosen them, and they tightened them instead,” Najjar complained. He and more than 200 inmates were released on Friday night in Kalandia. The doctors took refuge in a nearby hospital. Saturday afternoon, a Red Crescent vehicle brought them home. “In the end, what did they get from us? We are not terrorists. It was random harassment. So if people in our group were not violent before, they will be now,” Najjar said.
Several Palestinians have alleged that during searches they have been forced at gunpoint to enter rooms and offices in advance of accompanying Israeli soldiers, in an apparent attempt to avoid Israeli casualties from booby traps or remaining gunmen. members of —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.