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Violent abuse, humiliation, appalling overcrowding, cold and barren cells, shackles for days on end. A Palestinian who spent three months in Israeli administrative detention amid the Gaza war describes his experience at Ofer Prison

Amira, at home in the Aida camp this week, after release from Ofer Prison. “I was in Ofer before, but it was never like this.”Credit: Alex Levac Gideon LevyAlex Levac

Mar 23, 2024 5:31 am IST

Munther Amira has been released from “Guantanamo.” He’d already been arrested a few times in the past, but what he experienced during incarceration in an Israeli prison during the Gaza war is unlike anything he has ever gone through. A friend who spent 10 years in an Israeli prison told him that the impact of his own incarceration during the past three months was the equivalent of 10 years in jail during more normal times.

The detailed testimony we heard this week from Amira in his home in the Aida refugee camp, in Bethlehem, was shocking. He expressed his ordeal with his body, kneeling on the floor repeatedly, describing things in minute detail, without any feeling, until the words became unbearable. It was impossible to go on listening to the harrowing descriptions.

But it seemed as though he had been waiting for the opportunity to relate what he endured in an Israeli prison over the past several months. The descriptions poured from him in an unbroken flow – horror heaped on horror, humiliation after humiliation – as he described the hell he had been put through, in fluent English interspersed with Hebrew prison terminology. Over three months, he had lost 33 kilos (73 pounds).

There are two large pictures in his living room. One is of his friend Nasser Abu Srour, who has been imprisoned for 32 years for murdering a Shin Bet security service agent; the other is of him on the day of his release, exactly two weeks ago. This week Amira appeared to be physically and mentally resilient, looking like a different person than he did on the day he left prison.

Amira is 53, married and a father of five; he was born in this refugee camp, whose population includes descendants of the residents of 27 destroyed Palestinian villages. He designed the large key of return that hangs from the camp’s entry gate and bears the inscription, “Not for sale.” Amira is a political activist who believes in a nonviolent struggle, a principle he still holds even after the enormous number of deaths in Gaza in the war, he emphasizes. He is a member of Fatah who works in the Palestinian Authority’s Office for Settlements and the Fence, and a graduate of the social sciences faculty of Bethlehem University.

December 18, 2023, 1 A.M. Loud noises. Amira looks out the window and sees Israeli soldiers hitting his younger brother Karim, who is 40. The troops drag Karim up to the second floor, to Amira’s apartment, and throw him down in the middle of the living room. Amira says his brother fainted. Karim is the administrative director of the cardiac department in Al-Jumaya al-Arabiya Hospital in Bethlehem, and he’s not accustomed to this sort of violence.

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The room was packed with soldiers, dozens perhaps. Amira’s daughter, Yomana, was standing behind him. The officer said, “Take her,” and Amira’s heart skipped a beat. Had they come to arrest his 18-year-old student daughter? What was her transgression? The soldiers then bound his 13-year-old son Mohammed and his son Ghassan, who’s 22. Mohammed was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a map of the whole of Palestine – soldiers tore it off him.

Amira didn’t understand what was happening. The soldiers took his picture and sent it to wherever they sent it. “It’s him,” he heard them say afterward. He was bound and taken to a military base, where he was thrown onto the floor and kicked by soldiers, he relates. About an hour later, he was taken back home. He was blindfolded, but in the dark he heard Yomana shouting “I love you.” That fleeting, sweet moment would accompany him during the next three months in prison. He replied, “I love you, and don’t be afraid.” For that he was punished, but at least he felt calmer, knowing that Yomana had not been arrested.

He was again taken away and thrown into a military vehicle, where he was stepped on kicked by soldiers incessantly. He’s the age of the fathers of many of those same soldiers. He was then placed in the trunk of the car, and they started to move. After about half an hour, they reached a military base, where he was left outside on a cold winter night. The soldiers spoke among themselves about Gaza. One of them said to him, “Today we will fulfill your dream. You wanted to be a shahid [religious martyr]? We will send you to Gaza.” Amira shuddered, and answered, “I want to live, not die.” He was afraid that the troops would do what they threatened and already imagined his death in Gaza.

Morning came and he found himself in the Etzion detention center. “Now the show begins,” the soldiers said. Amira was taken into an office, where the handcuffs, which were already leaving blue bruises on his wrists, were removed, and he was ordered to strip. When he got to his underpants, he refused to continue. The soldiers kicked him and he fell to the ground. “Suddenly I understood what rape is, what sexual harassment is. They wanted to strip me and take my picture.” He stood naked, the soldiers told him to spread his legs, he felt humiliated as never before in his life. He was afraid that they would post the videos they took. Finally he was taken to a cell.

Supper consisted of a small plate of cream cheese and a slice of bread. But it was the next day’s lunch that truly flabbergasted Amira. Soldiers placed four trays in the four corners of the room, and eight detainees were ordered to kneel and eat off the trays with their hands. The image that came to mind was street cats, he recalls. The food consisted of unrecognizable and inedible mush. He says it was a mixture of leftovers from the soldiers’ meals. He asked what the white part was and was told that it was from an egg. He’s ready to swear that it was not an egg. Amira didn’t touch the food.

The next day he was moved to Ofer Prison, near Ramallah, where he was questioned about a few posts that the interrogators claimed he had uploaded and which he denied. “There is nothing in my Facebook [feed] that supports violence,” he says. The posts included identification with the fate of the residents of Gaza. “‘Mabruk [congratulations],’ the interrogator said. ‘You’re going to administrative detention'” – incarceration without a trial.

That was Amira’s lot for the next three months. He was sentenced to four months in prison, on the basis of no evidence, let alone a trial. “I was in Ofer before, but it was never like this.” The combination of a war during which Palestinians everywhere can be subjected to abuse, and the fact that the Israel Prison Service is under the purview of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, is leaving its mark. Amira decided not to resist anything, in order to survive.

He received a brown prison service uniform, with no underwear and with no connection to his size. Later, he exchanged clothes with another inmate. He had a mattress 5 centimeters (about 2 inches) thick and a wool blanket; he slept with 12 other detainees in a cell designed for five. “That is contrary to a High Court of Justice decision,” he notes. Eight inmates slept on the floor; because of his age he was given the use of a bed.

Amira discovered that he was in Wing 24 of the prison, which is earmarked for problematic detainees. “And I thought I was a good person,” he says with a smile. New prisoners who arrived from Gaza were held in the adjacent wing. He thinks some of them were from Hamas’ Nukhba unit. He will not soon forget their shouts. “People are screaming, people are barking, people are crying, locked up 24 hours a day, blindfolded, and the guards beat them nonstop.”

Not that things were easy in his wing. Five times during the three months, prison service special ops officers employing acute violence raided their cell, each time on a different pretext. The cell didn’t look the way an Ofer cell used to appear: It was completely bare. The television, the electric kettle, the burner, the radio, the books, the pen and paper, the chess, the backgammon – nothing remained, and of course there was no canteen. I came to terms with it, Amira says. This is the price of resistance to the occupation and the war in Gaza.

They assembled a backgammon board using a bread carton, and drew the markings for the game with a solution made from one prisoner’s crushed-up anti-anxiety tablets and water. The pieces were made from eggshells. Then one night, the patrol confiscated the improvised game. Punishment came swiftly. At 6 A.M., the special ops force Keter Ofer showed up with two dogs, and assaulted the inmates. Then they took them to the showers and washed them down in their clothes. The next morning they took away the blankets and mattresses, keeping them until 10 P.M. The cold was brutal.

No coffee, no cigarettes. It was a nightmare for smokers. Sometimes the prisoners would walk by and smoke into the cell to exacerbate their suffering. The aroma of the guards’ coffee also drove the inmates crazy. Two small dishes of jam for 13 prisoners, who fought just to get a taste.

“I counted the seconds,” Amira says, but time seemed to stand still in prison. For the first time he saw an inmate who tried to kill himself by throwing himself from the second floor onto the fence outside. Lately there have been more attempts at suicide in the prison, he says, which goes completely against the ethos of Palestinians who have decided to struggle against the occupation. The inmate who jumped was bleeding, his fellow inmates tried to call for a paramedic. But in Ofer you’re not allowed to call for anyone – so again they were punished. The Keter Ofer squad reappeared and this time made them all lie on the floor and beat them with truncheons. They hit Amira in the testicles, too. That too is sexual assault, in his view. “I said to myself: I am going to die. I have a blood pressure problem, and my heart was pounding. Some of us were bleeding from the nose.”

The eggs that were served were not cooked. A few days later, he decided he would eat everything, in order to survive. On one occasion, when they were taken to “waiting” cells (solitary cells for those about to be transferred), and he was handcuffed for an entire day and night. He had to relieve himself in his pants because he wasn’t able to lower them. “And everything has to do with October 7. Everything I asked for, they said ‘October 7.’ When we asked for the eggs to be cooked, they said: ‘October 7.’ It’s Guantanamo, I tell you.”

The Israel Prison Service spokesperson stated this week in response to an inquiry from Haaretz: “We are not aware of the allegations that are described, and as far as we know they are incorrect. If a proper complaint is submitted, it will be examined by the appropriate persons.”

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit told Haaretz: “The suspect was arrested on December 18, 2023, on suspicion of incitement and activity in a hostile organization. During a hearing in the military court on the military prosecutor’s request to extend his confinement, the suspect raised claims regarding his treatment by the soldiers during his imprisonment. The claims are being clarified.”

Amira was released after three months, a month ahead of schedule. No one told him anything, he was just given clothing supplied by the Red Cross and thought he was being freed as part of a deal (that didn’t happen). He told us in his home this week: “Mahmoud Darwish wrote that the prisoners are the source of hope of the Palestinian people. That is no longer true. It’s the first time that detainees are trying to commit suicide. The first time I felt that the door of the cell is the door of a grave. An Israeli prison is now a graveyard for the living.”