RAFAH — In the Israel-Hamas war, Palestinian women have borne the brunt of the months-long campaign. They have been killed, injured, uprooted from their homes, detained and mistreated in Israel’s detention centers.
Many international rights groups have documented the widespread violations against the population of Gaza since the war began on Oct. 7 following Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel.
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Male and female detainees have reported a “very broad range of ill-treatment” from the Israeli soldiers while in detention, said UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini. Such abuses include being forced to strip naked, verbal and psychological abuse, threats of electrocution, sleep deprivation, extreme noise and the use of dogs to intimidate people, he said.
The following is the first-person account (edited for clarity) of a 31-year-old Palestinian woman, who calls herself R.R., and who was detained for more than a month while fleeing Israel’s bombardment of northern Gaza.
Sheltering in schools
I lived in a room built from tin in the courtyard of my deceased parents’ house. I have five siblings, and I support myself thanks to my parents’ pension. At the beginning of the war, on Oct. 7, the Israeli planes started bombing our neighborhood, and I was afraid and panicked.
The planes later dropped leaflets calling to evacuate the area. So on Oct. 18 at 1 p.m, my brother, sister-in-law and I left our house and went to shelter at the al-Fakhura school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, where we stayed until mid-November. When Israeli tanks bombarded that school (I don’t remember the date), we moved to the Hafs school in central Jabaliya.
On Dec. 1 at 7 p.m. Israel’s military dropped white smoke bombs, killing Nadirah Tawil, a 55-year-old. Her daughter told me that her mother’s head was separated from her body. The ambulance came 30 minutes later and took her away. The bombing created thick smoke that filled school classrooms (we couldn’t see anything), and burned tents.
On Dec. 2 at around 11:39 a.m., Israeli planes dropped leaflets ordering the evacuation of the school to the Al-Darj and Tafah neighborhood. So, I went to a school, whose name I do not know. That night, I could hear the sounds of heavy shelling around the school.
Detained at the “safe passage”
At around 8 a.m. the next morning, we walked to the Netzarim junction, south of Gaza City through the so-called safe passage. When we arrived, an Israeli soldier ordered us, over loudspeakers, to sit on the ground and wait, which we did for half an hour. Then they asked us to move through the corridor, with ID cards raised, keeping a distance between each other.
The soldiers called me and asked for my ID card. I was carrying a bag with some of my belongings: clothes, bracelets, two rings, a gold earring, a laptop, a phone with a flashlight, and 2,000 shekels (5). A soldiers asked me to throw everything on the ground, and to go into a tent where a female soldier was standing, so I did.
The female soldier spoke to me in Hebrew, and a soldier standing two meters (6.5 ft) away, outside the tent door, translated. Using a loudspeaker, she told me to take off my clothes, including my underwear, to shake out my clothes and throw them on the ground, to bend and shake out my boots, and to straighten and shake out my hair.
The interrogator claimed that my brother worked for Hamas’s Qassam Brigades.
Once I took off all my clothes, the soldier screamed at me, ordering me to put them back on quickly and without the hijab. She then tied my hands in front of me with plastic handcuffs. She blindfolded me with a piece of cloth and sat me down on a sandy hill.
A few minutes later, she took me to a tent with a chair and a table. There, an interrogator asked me about my brothers and their jobs, claiming that my brother works for the Qassam Brigades (the military wing of Hamas). I said I didn’t know anything.
“Liar… You’re all liars,” he yelled, banging his hands on the table. After five minutes, he said, “If you want to leave, cooperate and answer every question” and he called for the soldiers to take me away. They threw me on the ground, where I stayed until 6 p.m. I was blindfolded but I could see other detained women, including a mother with a baby who was released at 2:30 p.m. The soldiers insultined us with very dirty words.
“Who should we shoot first?”
I asked the soldiers for water to drink and to use the bathroom, but they refused and insulted me. I sat with my head between my knees, as a female soldier ordered me to do. In the evening, I was cold, so I asked her for a cover. She brought a blanket, put it on me and then pulled it down. But it was so small, it was as if it wasn’t there.
Around 7 p.m., they took me to a room with a gravel floor. I was handcuffed and blindfolded. An hour later, they put me in a Jeep and drove me to a detention center called Zikim. There, the soldiers ordered me to take off all my clothes and they gave me gray pajamas, which I put on without underwear or a hijab. Then they tied my hands, blindfolded me and took me to a doctor who examined me.
They then took me to a cage and gave me a blanket and a thin mattress, which was too small for my body. I fell asleep while I was handcuffed and blindfolded, but the soldiers woke us (there were other detainees) up 30 minutes later. They kept us awake and ordered us to sit on our knees. Soldiers insulted us, pointed lasers at us and asked “who should we shoot first?”
At 8 a.m. the next day, they started interrogating the female detainees. My turn came at 6 p.m. The interrogation took place in a small container. A soldier sat behind a desk typing notes on a computer, as a female soldier questioned us. The interrogator showed me a picture of the outside of our house and the neighbors’ houses. She asked if there were cameras or tunnels in the area.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“Did you take part in the Return Marches (in 2018-2019)?” she asked. I said once.
“Did you see militants?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. Then she asked about my brothers and their jobs, about the Shaimaa school near our house and whether there were weapons in it.
“There is nothing there. It is a children’s school,” I replied.
“You’re a liar,” she said, showing me pictures of neighbors’ houses that had been flattened to the ground and asking me why the houses had been bombed.
“You bombed them,” I said. At the end of the 30-minute interrogation, she offered me a deal working for them, and told me to “go and think carefully.”
More interrogations
The next day around 8 a.m., they took me to the interrogation and the female soldier asked me if I had thought about the deal she had offered, saying, “You’re smart. You understand that working for us is better than returning to Gaza.”
“I don’t want to work with you, and I want to return to Gaza,” I replied. She asked me about my brothers-in-law, and I said they were farmers. She yelled at me, accusing me of telling lies and hitting me with the table.
They then took us one by one to a senior interrogator, who asked me about the election of Hamas leader, about my brothers, whether I worked with militant groups and whether I posted anything on my Facebook account on Oct. 7.
After this 5-minute interrogation, two female soldiers took me to a small room, like a corridor. One ordered me to take my clothes off, and she started beating my whole body. The two laughed and spoke in Hebrew.
After having me examined by a doctor, they put me in a room with 12 female detainees from Gaza and only five beds — the rest were on the floor. They gave me a very thin mattress and a blanket. The bathroom had no water. They gave us very little and unhealthy food: a piece of bread and cheese for breakfast; old rice or lentils for lunch; a burnt egg and a piece of bread for dinner.
An elderly detainee was screaming from the cold, and the soldiers came and ordered her to shut up.
We had plastic bracelets with a number on it. I don’t remember my number, but I remember that they count us four times a day. They also searched us regularly, taking us outside in the bitter cold to search us in a yard surrounded by barbed wires. We could shower, but there were cameras filming all our movements.
Four days before my release, I was put in iron shackles and interrogated for half an hour, after which they took my fingerprints (every finger and toe) and sampled by saliva. The female prisoners from the West Bank explained that this was to prepare for my release.
Around 1 p.m. on Jan. 18, the soldiers took us one by one to a small room, where I was strip-searched and then taken to another room to be fingerprinted again. They tied my hands and feet and put me in a small prisoner transport bus — we couldn’t see anything. We traveled in the cold for four hours to another detention center.
At this new center, we slept on thin mattresses with light sheets and we shivering from the extreme cold. An elderly detainee, Fahima Khalidi, was screaming from the cold, and the soldiers came and ordered her to shut up.
“Escape” to freedom
On Friday, Jan. 19 at 5 a.m., soldiers woke us up and told us to get ready. A half an hour later, they handcuffed and blindfolded us before leading us to a large bus along with other young detainees, both men and women. We traveled in the bus for more than three hours, and stopped the Kerem Shalom crossing. They let us off the bus, removed the blindfolds and handcuffs, gave me my ID, and then ordered us to walk.
We started running for about 200 meters, but on the wrong road so the soldier fired into the air. We turned around and ran 100 meters on another road, where we found two UNRWA cars. They took us to a tent 200 meters west, where the Red Cross gave us food, drinks and 300 shekels () each before taking us to the shelter center at the Taif Preparatory Boys’ School in Rafah’s Saudi neighborhood.
I am now living with five women who were also detained in a house with no lights. We eat only canned food and there is only enough for one meal each day. There is no bathroom here. The situation is very bad.
I hope that the war ends as soon as possible, so that I can live in peace and safety in my room in my family’s courtyard.
