First the IDF killed their little brother. Then Israel punished them.
The Balata refugee camp, December 2021
Gideon Levy reports in Haaretz on 3 December 2021
Imad was born last Monday via C-section at the Rafadiya Hospital in the West Bank city of Nablus. The newborn is named after his uncle, his father’s brother, whom he will never meet. The first Imad Hashash was a 15-year-old who went up to the roof of his house in the Balata refugee camp on the night of August 24, in order to see what was happening on the streets below during a raid by Israel Defense Forces. Imad peeked out – and was hit immediately, one of his brothers relates now. A soldier positioned in the corner of an alleyway aimed his rifle and shot Imad from afar. The bullet smashed into the teenager’s face and split his skull in two. He died instantly.
For this refugee family from Balata, however, the ordeal was only beginning – as has been the case for thousands of other Palestinian families under similar circumstances. The blow of the killing of a son and brother was only the first that Israel dealt to the Hashashes. It was followed by the automatic, draconian and cruel cancellation of the work permits held by Imad’s two brothers, who had been employed at an Israeli carpentry workshop for several years. The upshot is the family’s economic collapse. One brother, Abdallah, stands to lose the new home he bought, which he can no longer pay for; the second brother, Omar, is unable to pay for the C-section his wife underwent this week while giving birth to baby Imad. And all that is compounded by the ongoing plight of refugeehood in Balata, which evokes the Gaza Strip and is perhaps the grimmest and filthiest of all camps in the West Bank.
In order to get to his home, the father of the family, Khaled Hashash, 50, has to kick aside numerous bags of garbage strewn along the way. His is a typical refugee dwelling, crowded and congested, its interior reflecting a desperate attempt by the family to create a more pleasant appearance by means of cheap, colorful tiles on the walls and floors, on which a fluorescent light casts a pale glow. The house’s construction was never properly completed – it’s an ungainly jumble of jagged surfaces – and the third-story roof on which Imad was killed is half finished.
“Every home here has a sad story,” says Abdulkarim Sadi, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, who is accompanying us this week.
Within the dingy house, the grandmother, Aaliyah, 85, wearing a traditional embroidered dress, leans on her walker. She was born in the Palestinian village of Sheikh Munis, and when I tell her I live in Ramat Aviv, a Tel Aviv neighborhood built on the ruins of her village, her grandson Omar says, “That’s her place.” Three months after her grandson was killed, she is in constant mourning and sometimes dissolves into tears. Her daughter-in-law, Rubiya, Imad’s mother, died of stomach cancer at the age of 37, when Imad was 2-and-a-half years old. The mother’s photograph peers out over the living room; now it’s been joined by images of the dead son/grandson.
The couple had seven sons and four daughters, of whom Imad was the youngest. Khaled has worked since 1997 for the sanitation department of the Nablus Municipality as a cleaner for a paltry wage. The family’s chief providers were the two eldest, Omar and Abdallah, who worked in Israel. Abdallah is 36, married, the father of three children, and his wife is pregnant; Omar is 23 and as of last Monday, a father of two. His ID card is being kept by the hospital in which his son was born until he pays for his wife’s operation.
The brothers have been unemployed since Imad was killed and the Israeli authorities automatically terminated their permits to work at the carpentry shop, which is owned by an Israeli named Ilan Mordechai and located in the industrial zone of Kafr Qasem, near Petah Tikva. Abdallah had been employed there for the past four years, Omar for two. Each of them earned around 300 shekels a day (about $95), and they slept in a container next to the plant, returning home only on weekends. Both had work permits which they presented at the Eyal checkpoint every week. They say the work relations were good in Mordechai’s shop.
Their other brother, Mohammed, 21, who was with Imad on the night of August 24, is also unemployed. He worked for a time as a street sweeper, earning 50 shekels ($15) a day. He considered that an unfair salary and after his brother’s death he stopped working. The two were both awake late that night, following the IDF’s incursion into Balata – a frequent occurrence.
Imad, a seventh-grader, and Mohammed shared a room. At about 3:30 A.M., Mohammed asked Imad to go to the 24/7 grocery store opposite their house to buy him cigarettes. Meanwhile, voice messages posted in Balata’s social media groups were rife: The army’s in the camp. The troops had entered to arrest a resident on a suspected terrorism charge. When Imad got back from the grocery store he hurried up to the roof to see what was happening and to film the events on his phone and upload the clip. Mohammed followed him up. By that time the soldiers were already in the process of withdrawing from the camp, having arrested the individual they were looking for. Mohammed tells us that in their alley, stones were not being thrown at the soldiers, only in other streets. A distance away, at the corner of their alley, one last soldier remained, apparently to cover the force’s exit.
Imad peeked over the roof’s railing and the soldier immediately fired one bullet at him, which penetrated his nose; his brain spilled out next to the water container. Mohammed saw it all. A neighbor said she heard a female soldier who arrived say to the shooter: “You’ve killed him.” Khaled, the father, heard the sound of the shot in bed. Very quickly he grasped the horror.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit this week responded to Haaretz’s query: “In accordance with the statement issued on the day of the incident: At the conclusion of an operation by IDF fighters on August 24 to arrest a wanted individual in the Balata refugee camp, which is in the purview of the Shomron [Samaria] Territorial Brigade, a violent disturbance erupted that included the throwing of cinder blocks and objects at the IDF fighters from roofs of buildings adjacent to the force. During the disturbance a number of fighters spotted a suspect on the roof of a building who held a large object in his hands and sought to drop it on a fighter who was standing below the building. One of the fighters responded with shooting and a hit was observed.”
Mohammed quickly carried his brother’s body downstairs. A soldier who had arrived in the meantime threw a tear-gas grenade at the house, and the gas spread through the rooms. The family took Imad to the Muqata (government building) in Nablus, from where an ambulance carried him to Rafadiya, but all the physicians could do at that point was to determine the youth’s death. Relatives called Omar and Abdallah in Kafr Qasem, woke them and told them what had happened. They left immediately for the Nablus hospital, never to be allowed to return to their place of employ.
Their brother’s funeral was held that afternoon in the refugee camp.
Already that day the Shin Bet security service informed Ilan Mordechai, the owner of the carpentry shop, that the work permits of Abdallah and Omar had been canceled. No one bothered to tell them that directly, however. The owner told Omar’s father-in-law, who also works there, and he passed on the information; the father-in-law’s permit was not canceled. As noted, whenever a Palestinian is killed by Israeli forces, the immediate family is punished twice over by having their work permits canceled instantly, indefinitely and without explanation.
A spokesperson for Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories referred Haaretz’s request for a comment to the Shin Bet, which did not respond in time for publication.
Meanwhile, for over three months now, the two older Hashash brothers have sat at home. “We have to provide for our families, we have a commitment to them,” says Omar, a hardy young man with a shy smile.
A few months ago Abdallah bought a new apartment – in an attempt to create a life for himself and his family beyond the cycle of poverty in Balata – in a Nablus suburb near the Askar refugee camp. The apartment cost 255,000 shekels (about $81,000), of which he paid 80,000 shekels and took out a mortgage on the rest, to be repaid via monthly payments of 4,000 shekels. If Abdallah fails to pay for three consecutive months, he will lose the right to the apartment as well as the money he’s already paid. Meanwhile, he’s been knocking on doors, trying to get loans or charity for his distraught family from relatives, neighbors and friends. Otherwise he will lose the apartment and his whole world.
This week Omar’s wife, Razan, gave birth to their son, Imad. The family has no medical insurance, and Imad will not get his ID card back from the hospital until he pays 2,000 shekels he doesn’t have for the C-section. He too is trying to scrounge for money. With no ID card, and no work permit, the life of a Palestinian in the territories is not a life.
This article is reproduced in its entirety