The moped driver who was shot and snatched away from paramedics. The mother who went to visit her wounded son and discovered that the patient in the bed was someone else, who’d been declared dead. The toddlers used as human shields. Stories from Aqabat Jabr
Haaretz | Gideon Levy | Mar 31, 2023
Someone in the room said they heard a gunshot, someone else immediately checked for updates in the refugee camp’s social media. There are undercover Israeli troops in the alleyways, the reports said.
The army had invaded the camp again, this time in broad daylight, in order to kidnap people without any legal authority to do so – an act known in Israel as “arresting terror activists.” Everyone became tense and began to leave the house cautiously, one after the other, in a line. On the street people were running. Something was happening, elsewhere in the camp. At the end of the street, locals warned drivers to turn around; soldiers were there. We left the camp via a bypass road.
This happened last Monday afternoon, when we visited the Aqabat Jabr refugee camp on the outskirts of Jericho, to document what’s been happening in this remote place in recent weeks. While within Israel, people were holding their breath in anticipation of the prime minister’s announcement about suspending his legislative “reform” package, inhabitants of Aqabat Jabr held their breath in fear of the Israeli army, which has begun to stage frequent raids there, leaving behind dead and wounded.
Never has normally quiet Jericho seemed so far from Tel Aviv. Two recent shooting attacks whose perpetrators came from the camp – in one of them no was hurt; in the other, an American-born Israeli, Elan Ganeles, 26, was killed – have repeatedly brought the army into Aqabat Jabr’s narrow alleys.
Around midday on March 1, Nasser Shloun, 58, arrived at the home of his brother Maher, to change the lock on the front door. Nasser is a former prisoner who in 1989 was given a life sentence for the murder of a police officer; he was released within the framework of the 1993 Oslo Accords. One of his brothers was murdered by unknown assailants a week after his own release from an Israeli prison; yet another brother was released years ago in an unstable mental state from which he has not recovered.
Nasser has five children, among them 2-year-old twins Mohammed and Ahmed, who are sitting on his lap today, dressed identically. According to their father, the toddlers were taken by soldiers and used as human shields against stone throwing, when the Israel Defense Forces raided the camp on March 1. The soldiers ordered one of the young people out in the street, Mohammed Ayush, to hold baby Mohammed in his arms as protection from the stones; the soldiers then did the same with his twin, Ahmed.
The soldiers had come into the camp that day to arrest Maher Shloun, 44, whom Nasser was visiting, on suspicion of taking part in the February 27 attack in which Ganeles was killed. They surrounded the house, brandishing their rifles, and ordered everyone to come out with hands raised. Nasser was holding his twin sons.
Maher stayed inside with one of his children and the soldiers threatened to blow up the house along with them inside. In the meantime, a moped arrived, driven by Mahmoud Bahura Hamdan, 22, who works in a local carpentry shop and had given a fellow worker, Mohammed Shloun, 52, another brother of Nasser’s and Maher’s, a ride home. After his passenger disembarked, Hamdan drove off quickly. The soldiers called to him to stop; apparently alarmed by their presence, he skidded and fell. Nasser was an eyewitness to what happened: When Hamdan tried to get up, he tells us now, the soldiers, who were about 30 meters away, shot at him, hitting him in the upper body.
Astonishingly, Hamdan did not fall to the ground after being shot. He managed to remain standing and even took a few steps. He told those around him that everything was all right with him. His sister, who lives nearby, took him into her home; a bit later he came out and walked toward a Palestinian ambulance that the family had summoned. According to Nasser, it was at this stage that the soldiers assaulted Hamdan and knocked him down. Nasser maintains that they shot him again, but according to Aref Daraghmeh, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, only one bullet struck Hamdan. His sister stated too that she heard another shot.
In any event, Hamdan’s condition began to deteriorate quickly, and Red Crescent paramedics who had come with the ambulance tried to resuscitate him. About 15 minutes later, Nasser relates, an IDF jeep arrived and ordered the paramedics to disconnect Hamdan from the tubes in order to take him with them in the jeep and arrest him. They wanted to lay him on the floor, but in the end agreed to move him to a stretcher.
His family knew nothing about the fate of their loved one until that evening, when rumors reached them that he had died from his wounds. The bereaved father, Jamal, a beekeeper of 53, stricken with grief, talks about the doubts that gnawed at him. A week later, Israel returned his son’s body.
In the meantime, the troops continued their siege on the house of Maher, who had barricaded himself inside. A Shin Bet security service agent arrived and threatened Nasser, “Do you want to become the brother of a shahid, a martyr?” Nasser replied that he was already the brother of a shahid – one of his brothers had been killed long ago. “Are you here to kill or to arrest? If you’re here to arrest, I will go into the house and persuade my brother to come out,” he told the Shin Bet agent.
About two hours after Maher locked himself inside, Nasser entered his brother’s house and emerged with him, both men with hands raised. Maher was taken to his car, a Hyundai SUV parked in front of the house. After taking it almost completely apart, the soldiers had found a pistol in the vehicle. Maher, a member of Fatah, had been one of Yasser Arafat’s drivers. Maybe he will be charged with Ganeles’ murder.
Nasser, three of his brothers and a nephew were also taken into custody, but were released a day later. Maher’s friend Loai Maarouf, who was in the house with him, was also arrested. The two remain in custody.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit provided the following response to a query from Haaretz about the incident: “During an operation to arrest wanted individuals in Aqabat Jabr on March 1, 2023, two suspects tried to escape, and while efforts were being made to apprehend them, shots were fired. One of the suspects was wounded by the shooting and was administered medical care at the site. A few minutes later, an medical ambulance was dispatched, manned by a senior medical official, to evacuate the suspect, who later died of his wounds. The circumstances of this incident are still under investigation. Other wanted individuals turned themselves in to the soldiers and were arrested.
“During the incident a local resident approached the forces with his young son in order to receive medical treatment. A medical officer administered treatment to the child. The army is unaware of any claim that the child was used as a human shield. If a complaint to that effect is submitted, it will be investigated according to the protocol.”
In an earlier incident, on February 6, Daraghmeh recalls, the army had entered the refugee camp at 3:30 A.M., a few days after a restaurant at the Almog Junction on the Dead Sea came under fire, with no casualties. The troops focused on a mobile home in a relatively isolated spot in the camp, next to a construction site. They fired into the mobile home and those inside shot at them. Daraghmeh, who arrived at the site at 6 A.M., found that 13 bullets were fired from inside the mobile home and 21 bullets were fired into it by the soldiers.
The inside walls of the trailer home were smeared with blood. The army stated that five young men had been killed in the operation. Daraghmeh says that the amount of blood staining the walls didn’t seem to be enough for five people. When the names of those killed were published, and it also emerged that another person, Alaa Aweidat, 26, had been wounded and was hospitalized in Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. It would be a month before Alaa’s mother, Nuha, 44, received a permit to visit him, and she made her way quickly to Jerusalem.
At Hadassah, however, Nuha was flabbergasted to discover that the person in the bed was not her son but a different young man, Thayer Aweidat, whose family had just finished the 40-day period of mourning his death. Nuha was removed from the room and hurried home, to the refugee camp. With the assistance of a lawyer, Nadine Abu Arafeh, from the Center for the Defense of the Individual, a Jerusalem-based NGO, the family went to court in order to discover what had happened to their son.
This is the unbelievable response that Abu Arafeh received in writing from attorney Matanya Rosin, an assistant in the state prosecution’s High Court of Justice unit: “In response to your application in the matter of locating the detainee Alaa Aweidat, according to the information that was provided by the Civil Administration and the security sources, the above-mentioned is apparently not among the living and his body is being held in the Institute of Forensic Medicine. We will note that we were informed that the family can request an entry permit to Israel in order to identify the body. This marks the end of our handling of your application.”
Those were the words: “Apparently not among the living” and “the end of our handling” of the matter. It’s hard to contain oneself in the face of this appalling inhumanity. Since then Nuha Aweidat submitted a request to be able to go identify her son’s body, but has had no reply. The camp has been rife with rumors since the attorney’s letter arrived, and all five families whose sons were said to have been killed on February 6 and have yet to receive their bodies are distraught: Maybe their sons are not dead?
Among those reported killed were two brothers – Ibrahim Aweidat, 28, and Raafat Aweidat, 22. On Monday this week, while we were in the camp, we called their father, Wahal, 52, to arrange a meeting with him. He didn’t answer. That afternoon we learned that the Israeli force that invaded the camp at midday had come to take the bereaved father into custody. In the course of his kidnapping-arrest, which lasted two hours, four young people, one of them 13, were shot in their legs.
Days in the life of Aqabat Jabr, a refugee camp on the outskirts of Jericho.