At least 100 Palestinian men
detained by Israeli forces have been stripped to their underwear, blindfolded
and made to kneel on a street in northern Gaza, according to images and videos
widely circulated on social media and confirmed by the Israeli army.
The men were shown with their
heads bowed as they were guarded by Israeli troops in the undated video that
first surfaced on Thursday, which has drawn condemnation.
Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher,
reporting from occupied East Jerusalem, said on Friday that the images echoed
the history of the region, where stripped men are taken to unknown locations.
Many of the detainees were
recognised by members of the community and family.
“Some say one was a student, one
ran the local store and another one had no connection with ‘terrorism’ as he
lived in an apartment block. … A number of people identified a well-known local
journalist among those who were arrested,” according to Fisher, who added that
one man was with his two children and all three of them were rounded up.
Shawan Jabarin, director of the
Al-Haq human rights organisation, said he was “shocked” to see images that
reminded him of the treatment of detainees and prisoners of war during World
War II.
“This [is] inhuman, it amounts to
torture and more than that, it’s a war crime and a crime against humanity,” he
told Al Jazeera.
Israeli media reported that some
of the images appeared to show suspected Hamas fighters who had surrendered to
Israeli forces.
Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan,
reporting from Tel Aviv, said later on Friday that some of the Palestinians
detained in the incident were released.
According to family members, one
of the released detainees was a shopkeeper with no ties to Hamas, he said.
About the Israeli response on the
images, Khan said that the army statement was unapologetic.
“This is simply a tactic that
they are going to use. They don’t care about the criticism from the
international community or the human rights groups,” he added.
Daniel Hagari, the Israeli army
spokesperson, said earlier: “During this fighting, those who stay in the area,
come out of tunnels and some out of houses, we investigate and check who is
linked to Hamas and who is not, we detain and interrogate all of them.”
He did not speak directly about
the images but said that hundreds of suspects have been interrogated so far and
that many have surrendered in the past 24 hours.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human
Rights Monitor said the men were “arbitrarily arrested” in the northern Gaza
Strip after Israeli forces surrounded two shelters in the town of Beit Lahiya
for days.
They were taken from the Khalifa
bin Zayed and New Aleppo schools, both of which are affiliated with the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East
(UNRWA), the rights group said in a statement.
Ahmed Bedier, president of the
United Voices for America civic engagement group, called the images “horrific”.
“This is a way to humiliate, this
is a psychological warfare, designed to break the Palestinian people and tell
them no place is safe, including shelters,” he told Al Jazeera.
The Al-Araby Al-Jadeed news
outlet, also known as The New Arab, said its correspondent Diaa al-Kahlout was
among those detained and had been taken to an unknown location.
He, his brothers and other
relatives were among dozens of men arrested, The New Arab said in a statement
on its website, adding that the detainees were forced to strip and were
searched before being taken to an unknown destination.
The outlet called on “the
international community, journalists’ rights defenders and watchdogs, and human
rights bodies to denounce this ongoing assault committed by the Israeli
occupation army against journalists since [October 7] and exert efforts to ensure
they are released from detention and protected”.
Violation of international law
On Friday, the Palestinian armed
group Hamas condemned the stripping of the men and called on international
human rights groups to investigate the incident.
“Stripping them of their clothes
in a humiliating manner is a blatant Zionist crime to take revenge on our
defenceless civilians as a result of the blows suffered by its soldiers and
officers at the hands of Palestinian resistance men,” Izzat al-Risheq, a Hamas
official, said in a statement.
“We hold the occupation
responsible for their lives and safety, and we call on all human rights and
humanitarian institutions and organizations to intervene,” the statement read.
Fisher said: “Of course, it would
be a violation of international law for prisoners of war to be treated this way
and for pictures to be taken of them and then published.”
He added that more concerning for
international aid groups and human rights organisations was that “it is
entirely unclear where these men have been taken or what may actually happen to
them”.
The images and videos were taken
from the vantage point of Israeli troops, and one clip shows dozens of men
sitting cross-legged in rows of three and four with their heads bowed in the
middle of a wide street.
One photo shows soldiers with
assault rifles guarding dozens of men kneeling in a line alongside the wall of
a building. Another photo shows detainees being lined up in an empty field.
The last video appears to show
detainees packed into the back of moving army trucks.
Israel said it has detained and
interrogated hundreds of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West
Bank since Hamas’s October 7 attacks in southern Israel.
Following those attacks, Israel
started a massive air and ground offensive on the enclave.
More than 17,100 Palestinians
have been killed in Gaza since October 7, according to the authorities in the
enclave.
Israel said its death toll stands
at about 1,150.
Teacher, author and activist Dr. Refaat al-Ar’eer murdered in
Israeli airstrike
On
December 6, Dr. Refaat al-Ar’eer, a Palestinian author, educator and activist,
was reportedly murdered by the US-backed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in an
airstrike that targeted his sister’s home in Gaza.
Announcing
Dr. al-Ar’eer’s death on X/Twitter, Ramy Abdul, chairman of Euro-Med Monitor, a
non-profit Europe and Middle East-based human rights organization, said the
“assassins targeted, went after and killed the voice of Gaza, one of its best
academics, a human, my dear and precious friend Dr. Refaat al-Ar’eer.”
Dr.
al-Ar’eer was the editor of two books, Gaza Unsilenced and Gaza Writes Back,
the latter a collection of 23 short stories written by young Palestinians who
survived the 2008-2009 Israeli military campaign “Operation Cast Lead.” An
international bestseller, Gaza Writes Back was published in 2014 in six
different languages.
Dr.
al-Ar’eer taught English and poetry at the Islamic University in Gaza.
Muhammad
Shehada, chief of communications for Euro-Med Monitor, reported that the
December 6 bombing also killed al-Ar’eer’s brother, sister and her four
children. Shehada, quoting Dr. al-Ar’eer, noted that the December 6 bombing was
not the first time the IDF had targeted a familial residence of Dr. al-Ar’eer.
In
2014, Dr. al-Ar’eer said the IDF killed “my brother; it destroyed my apartment
when it brought down the family home that housed 40 people. ... Nusayba and I
are a perfectly average Palestinian couple. ... We’ve lost more than 30
relatives.”
The
targeted killing of Dr. al-Ar’eer, one of thousands of civilians murdered by
the Israeli government with the full support of the United States in the last
two months, is a heinous war crime that will never be forgotten by the
international working class.
Prior
to his murder, Dr. al-Ar’eer, a teacher, accomplished writer and Palestinian
rights activist, had amassed a substantial following on social media, including
under his X/Twitter handle “Refaat in Gaza,” where he regularly posted about
life under Israeli occupation and the current military siege.
In
his last X/Twitter post, al-Ar’eer quoted a December 3 war-mongering video
statement from Vice President Kamala Harris and accurately stated: “The
Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by
Israel.”
As
of this writing, that post has been “liked” over 68,000 times, “retweeted” over
29,000 times and has over 7.3 million “views.”
Following
his death, journalists from around the world expressed their grief and anger on
social media.
Journalist
Katie Halper wrote, “This is so upsetting. Oh my god. We spoke to him on our
podcast Useful Idiots. He was so nice. He was so brave. He spoke to us about
how traumatized his children were. When he spoke to us there were bombs going
off in the background. Biden this is on you.”
Al-Ar’eer
and his family are some of the reported 350 Palestinians that have been killed
by Israeli military forces in the last 24 hours, according to the Gaza Health
Ministry. In what is no doubt an underestimation, the Health Ministry has
confirmed that at least 17,177 Palestinians have been killed since October 7.
As
the IDF ground operation moves into the south of the Gaza Strip, where some 1.9
million people have been displaced, harrowing images that will be used in
future war crimes trials have emerged showing IDF soldiers kidnapping
blindfolded and almost entirely naked Palestinian males at gunpoint.
Some
of the hostages are being transported to Israeli prisons or, possibly, mass
graves. Euro-Med Monitor reported that an eyewitness saw Israeli soldiers shoot
seven civilians, one of whom was carrying a white flag, for not following
soldiers’ humiliating orders to strip themselves fast enough.
While
the IDF has claimed that every Palestinian male stripped and kidnapped is a
“Hamas fighter,” Palestinian Ambassador Husam Zomlot accused the Israeli
occupation of kidnapping the Palestinian civilians from a United Nations
shelter. Others were reportedly taken from a United Nations school that has
been transformed into a shelter.
While
Israel has yet to present a shred of evidence that any of those kidnapped were
“Hamas fighters,” several have already been identified by colleagues, human
rights organizations and family members as journalists, United Nations workers
and even children.
The
images of heavily armed camouflaged soldiers stripping and abusing Middle
Easterners evoked immediate comparisons from millions around the world to the
torture methods popularized by US imperialism at the turn of the century,
including the mass abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the ongoing torture
of alleged “terrorists” at the Guantanamo Bay military prison.
These
latest war crimes have continued to fuel global opposition to the genocide and
US imperialism. Protests in countries throughout the world continued on
Thursday, including outside weapons manufacturers in Europe and the United
States.
On
the internet, previous video interviews and articles from Dr. al-Ar’eer have
been shared by millions of people, including a 2021 column published in the New
York Times headlined, “My child asks, ‘Can Israel Destroy Our Building if the
Power is Out?’”
Al-Ar’eer
wrote:
On Tuesday, Linah asked her question
again after my wife and I didn’t answer it the first time: Can they destroy our
building if the power is out? I wanted to say: “Yes, little Linah, Israel can
still destroy the beautiful al-Jawharah building, or any of our buildings, even
in the darkness. Each of our homes is full of tales and stories that must be
told. Our homes annoy the Israeli war machine, mock it, haunt it, even in the
darkness. It can’t abide their existence. And, with American tax dollars and international
immunity, Israel presumably will go on destroying our buildings until there is
nothing left.”
But I can’t tell Linah any of this. So I
lie: “No, sweetie. They can’t see us in the dark.”
In
one of his last interviews from Gaza for Electronic Intifada, Dr. al-Ar’eer
said, “We know it is very bleak, very dark. There is no water, there is no way
out of Gaza ... what should we do? Drown? Commit mass suicide? Is this what
Israel wants? We are not going to do that.
“I
was telling a friend the other day, I am an academic, the toughest thing I have
at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade, if the paratroopers
charge at us and go door to door, to massacre us, I’m going to use that marker
to throw it at the Israeli soldiers even if it is the last thing I would be
able to do, and this is the feeling of everyone. We are helpless and we have
nothing to lose.”
In
a digital manifestation of the broad opposition to the Israeli military
campaign among workers and youth around the world, since his murder, a poem
published by Refaat al-Ar’eer has been viewed over 13 million times and has
been retweeted over 65,000 times as of this writing. Accompanying the poem,
which is titled “If I must die,” Dr. al-Ar’eer wrote, “If I must die, let it be
a tale. #FreePalestine #Gaza.” He wrote:
If
I must die,
you
must live
to
tell my story
to
sell my things
to
buy a piece of cloth
and
some strings,
(make
it white with a long tail)
so
that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while
looking heaven in the eye
awaiting
his dad who left in a blaze-
and
bid no one farewell
not
even to his flesh
not
even to himself—
sees
the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and
thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing
back love
if
I must die
let
it bring hope
let
it be a tale
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