Gaza Brothers Stripped and Abused by Israeli Army, One Captured : Analysis

Most of these days, Khader al-Saeedi is haunted by the memories of the last time he saw his brother, Mohammed.

“I feel like I’m losing my mind,” said Khader, a 21-year-old fisherman.

The two brothers were walking with their family on the “safe passage” that Israeli forces instructed Palestinians in northern Gaza to take in order to flee south.

However, shortly after reaching Wadi Gaza, they encountered dozens of Israeli tanks lining the Salah al-Din Road, Gaza’s main highway, with snipers positioned on top.

“You there! The one with the blue bag! Come here,” one soldier commanded Mohammed.

The soldier then ordered Khader to do the same. Khader approached the soldiers, following his brother, holding his ID up in one hand.

“They told me to strip, so I took off my clothes,” Khader stated. “They forced me to empty the bag that I was carrying, as well as the blue bag that Mohammed had. Then they ordered me to raise my arms, turn around, and do various actions.”

The soldiers instructed Mohammed, 18, to do the same. There was a third man who was also singled out from the crowd, and he too had to strip down to his underwear.

“My brother was not afraid of the soldiers, and that annoyed them,” Khader said. “They reprimanded him for the way he walked, almost as if he were strolling, and said, ‘Do you think you’re on the playground? Come here.'”

Mohammed was taken to the other side of the trench, out of sight. The soldiers then ordered Khader to get dressed.

“They told me I had 10 seconds to pack up the bags, but I became nervous and said I no longer wanted the clothes,” Khader said. “One of the soldiers pointed his gun at me and pulled the trigger. I hurriedly gathered what I could in my arms and turned to rejoin the rest of the moving crowd.”

That was the last time he saw Mohammed.

For 30 minutes, Khader walked in his underwear until he caught up with his worried mother, Ola.

Three days earlier, Ola’s brother, Izzat, visited their home in the Shati refugee camp. A few hours after he left, Ola learned that he had been killed in an Israeli airstrike.

“I spent four hours searching for his body at the morgue with my Mohammed,” said Ola, 41. “The next day, we managed to bury him.”

That day, as relatives gathered at Ola’s house to pay their respects, the bombings around them intensified and approached. They decided to relocate to Ola’s brother-in-law’s ground-floor apartment.

However, a few minutes later, the bombing reached them.

“I just remember something heavy falling on us,” Ola recalled. “It was chaos. I crawled on my hands and knees to get out, barefoot. I saw one of my sons, Khader, and told him to find his siblings and get out.”

Ola’s nephew Ali, Mohammed’s cousin and best friend, was killed. Her sister’s husband was brain dead and died in the hospital a few hours later. Most of the block had been destroyed.

Over 100 members of the extended family spent the night at al-Shifa Hospital, first sleeping near the morgue. However, when Israeli warplanes attacked the hospital’s rooftop solar panels, terrorizing the tens of thousands of displaced families there, Ola’s husband decided they needed to move south.

“I didn’t want to leave, and neither did Mohammed, who wanted to stay at the hospital and volunteer as a medic,” Ola explained. “But we had already buried four members of my family in two days, and our home was destroyed.”

The family, along with Ola’s elderly mother-in-law Aida, squeezed into their car and drove as close as possible to the “safe passage.”

“Mohammed sat in my lap and I whispered to him not to be impulsive because he didn’t want to leave,” Ola recounted. “He smiled and replied, ‘As long as you’re okay, I’ll be okay.'”

They parked the car and joined the crowds on Salah al-Din Road, but they quickly became separated, with Ola’s husband walking at his mother’s slower pace some distance behind.

The crowd continued to move, with Israeli soldiers randomly ordering people to approach them and threatening anyone else who stopped or looked around.

When the soldiers ordered her two sons to come forward, Ola froze. Others pushed past her, warning her to keep going or risk being shot. One woman scolded Ola for causing them harm.

“I told them I couldn’t just carry on when my two boys were taken!” Ola exclaimed. “We had seen a man stripped to his underwear collecting his clothes, and I thought that was what the Israelis would do to my sons, just to humiliate them. I didn’t know what to do; how is a mother supposed to act in this situation?”

Ola and her daughters moved slowly, stealing glances here and there. When Khader finally caught up with them, Ola wrapped him in one of his sister’s long coats.

The third man who had been detained with the brothers was released and found Khader, reassuring him not to worry as the soldiers had said that Mohammed would be released soon after being handcuffed, blindfolded, and interrogated.

“We waited on the road for an hour, but we saw no sign of him,” Khader said. His father and grandmother Aida caught up with them at this point. Upon hearing what had happened, the 70-year-old grandmother returned to where the Israeli tanks were stationed. Holding her white scarf in one hand, she sat between the two tanks and refused to leave until Mohammed was released. She screamed at the soldiers, cried, and begged them to return her grandson.

“She said that she wasn’t afraid of being killed, even as others tried to convince her to leave, warning her that she would be shot,” Khader said. “After an hour, the snipers started shooting, and people were forced to throw themselves on the ground.”

Reluctantly, Aida began walking again, moving extra slowly as the sun set.

After a 12km (7.5 miles) walk, the family arrived in Maghazi camp, dazed and unable to comprehend what had just happened. They called the Red Cross multiple times, providing their testimonies and Mohammed’s details.

According to various testimonials from displaced Palestinians who used the “safe passage,” hundreds of Palestinian men, and to a lesser extent, some women and children, have been detained at Israeli checkpoints, abducted, and taken to unknown locations.

Last month, Palestinian poet Mosab Toha was among those fleeing northern Gaza and was kidnapped by Israeli forces. Human rights lawyer Diana Buttu stated that Toha was taken to a prison in the Naqab (Negev) desert, where he was interrogated and beaten along with 200 other men abducted from Gaza. Toha was released a day later.

Hisham Mhanna, spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross, confirmed that the organization receives numerous phone calls from families reporting their missing or detained relatives.

“We take the information of the detained person and communicate with the Israeli side to determine their whereabouts,” he said. However, he did not disclose the number of calls received regarding the “safe passage.”

“We believe that the soldiers took him to be tortured and used as a human shield,” Ola claimed, tears streaming down her face. “I wish we had never left the hospital. I feel like I handed my son over to the Israelis.”

She took a deep breath.

“Mohammed is courageous,” she said. “Before we were displaced, he was always at the forefront, helping people in Shati, rescuing families from the rubble, and providing first aid to the injured.”

The family is currently staying at a relative’s house in Deir el-Balah and,

Source: Aljazeera news: Two Gaza brothers stripped, jeered at by Israeli army, one taken captive