The Israeli Army Said a Palestinian Was Killed in a Raid on Jenin. His Family Believes Otherwise
Wissam Hanoun
Gideon Levy and Alex Levac report in Haaretz on
Is this Wissam, the son of Iyad and Kifah Hanoun, who are “150 percent” certain that it is in fact him? Or is it someone else? Was Wissam hospitalized here under a different name – Hadassah informed Haaretz this week that according to the hospital’s records, no one by the name of Wissam Hanoun has ever been a patient there – or is this a case of mistaken identity and the man is not Wissam?
The Israel Defense Forces stated seven months ago that Wissam was killed during an incursion into the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. A few days later, though, doubt began to gnaw at the parents. Their doubts about Wissam’s death grew in the past few months, and now they are absolutely convinced that their son is alive. They have already spent tens of thousands of shekels on lawyers in an effort to find Wissam – but in vain. Time is running out for his mother, Kifah, 50: She is suffering from advanced lung cancer.
Until the war in Gaza, the couple had two sons and a daughter. Wiam, 28, was killed in October 2023 by a missile fired at him from an Israeli aircraft in the Jenin refugee camp; his older brother, according to the IDF, was killed in an army raid in the camp five weeks later, on November 29. Their only remaining child, if so, is their daughter, Rahil, a 24-year-old engineering student. But the mother and father insist otherwise.
The skeleton of a wrecked jeep, adorned with a Palestine flag and a floral wreath, stands mute at the entrance to the house where we met Iyad, 54, this week. He is a greengrocer who lives with his family in the Jenin camp, and has a vegetable store in the adjacent town of Qabatiyah. Four young men were killed in this vehicle during Ramadan this spring, when it was struck by a missile.
Wiam had been on Israel’s most-wanted list for years and had been wounded several times by the army, but was never arrested. Wissam, 29, was a law student at the Arab American University in Jenin, but over a period of eight years, he was unable to complete his studies because of his frequent arrests. The two brothers were unmarried; both devoted their lives to the resistance.
Last November 29, seven weeks after the eruption of the war in Gaza, a large contingent of Israeli army forces stormed the refugee camp. Wissam and his good friend Mohammed (Hamudi) Zubeidi, both of them wanted and armed, hid in a house in the Al-Damaj neighborhood. The troops conducted a house-to-house search in pursuit of them. When they were found, the army demolished the house with them inside, and announced that the two had been killed.
We visited the ruins of the building a few days later. Jamal Zubeidi, Muhammad’s bereaved father, told us that they had found one of his son’s shoes in the rubble, a black Nike Air, and thus were convinced that Hamudi was dead. The IDF stated after his death that he had been the “commander of Jenin camp.” I’d known him since his childhood.
A few months earlier, Hamudi had taken us on a tour of the camp, driving with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He and Wissam were close friends from boyhood. Each lost a brother before being killed themselves. They belonged to two very different organizations: Wissam was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, while Hamudi joined Islamic Jihad a decade ago. In Jenin all the organizations operate and fight together.
Until the Israeli forces left the camp, at midday on November 30, no one dared leave their house. Immediately afterward the reports started to circulate: Wissam Hanoun and Hamudi Zubeidi had been killed. The owner of the house that was razed in the assassination told people that she had seen an army backhoe loader pick up the two men in its bucket and take them away. She claimed that one of them was motionless, dead, but that the other one seemed to be alive.
The families called the Palestinian Civil Liaison office in Jenin for information about the fate of the two men. Both had been killed, they were told. Mourning tents were erected in their memory. The IDF, following its usual practice, took the bodies and hasn’t returned them.
An IDF communiqué issued that day stated: “In a joint operation of the IDF, Shin Bet [security service] and Border Police in the Jenin refugee camp, fighters of the Police Special Anti-Terror Unit eliminated two ranking terrorists, including the camp’s commander, Muhammad Zubeidi… The PSAT fighters surrounded the building in which Zubeidi had closeted himself together with additional terrorists and fired at the building. Following searches in the building, two terrorists who were eliminated were located, Muhammad Zubeidi and Hussam [sic] Hanoun.”
The army raided the camp again two weeks later, killing seven young men. Iyad Hanoun visited the mourning tent in order to console the seven new grieving families. He told us this week that while he was there, officers from Palestinian Preventive Security told him that Wissam was alive and had been taken to an IDF detention facility at Salem, east of Nablus. Iyad’s doubts about his son’s purported death grew, and with them, hope. He began beating on doors in order to find his son.
He approached several Israeli lawyers in quick succession. They took huge fees, made promises, generated even more doubts in him and ignited hopes – but failed to come up with an iota of evidence about what happened to his son. The fog was not lifted. One lawyer claimed to have heard from the Shin Bet security service that Wissam was alive and in detention. Iyad declared a reward of 100,000 shekels (approximately $27,000) for solid information about his son’s fate. Another lawyer advised Iyad to contact the International Red Cross, who might have information, and he did so.
The IRC told him that since October 7, Israel was no longer cooperating with the organization, after it had failed to come up with information about the fate of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. In the meantime, two employees of Hadassah Medical Center who live in East Jerusalem called the camp to say that two wounded men from Jenin refugee camp had been brought to the hospital on November 29. Did anyone in the camp know anything about them? In response, the employees were told that the army had taken two bodies from the camp on November 29.
Four months after the incident, a video clip was posted on social media showing a bearded young man lying unconscious in the ICU of Hadassah Ein Karem. The family was told by a hospital employee that this person had been unconscious for 114 days and then had woken up and had been taken from the hospital. It’s hard to know from photographs of Wissam whether he is the hospitalized person. Abdulkarim Sadi, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, who accompanied us in the camp, thinks it is the same person but was careful this week not to raise false hopes in the family.
Immediately after the video appeared, residents of the camp gathered outside the home of the Hanoun family. Wissam’s father says he recognized his son right away in the clip; his mother says that from the first day she had a feeling that Wissam hadn’t been killed. In the meantime, another lawyer contacted the Palestinian Ministry of Detainees, which in turn was in touch with the Israeli authorities but did not get a reply.
Yet another lawyer offered to try to obtain a video of Wissam alive in return for 75,000 shekels, Iyad relates. At first she asked for 10,000 shekels in order to find out whether Wissam was alive, and after saying she had confirmed he was, requested the additional amount. (They declined to pay the second sum when she refused to show them the video first.) One lawyer claimed to have discovered that Wissam is in the Israel Prison Service hospital in Ramle. Someone told the family that Wissam had been wounded in the chest and legs, but that his condition was improving. No evidence was provided for any of this information.
One lawyer said that the army had already acknowledged that Wissam was in administrative detention (imprisonment without charges) and that on May 29 his term had been extended for another six months. He added that he would provide Iyad with the written evidence – and then disappeared.
This week Haaretz put the question to the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, which in response made do with reissuing its November 29 announcement of Wissam’s death. Ido Efrati, Haaretz’s health affairs correspondent, got in touch with Hadassah Ein Karem, which informed him that there is no record of a patient of that name in the hospital’s records. “There is no technique for changing identification details in the system… If he doesn’t appear at all in Hadassah’s systems, apparently he was not in Hadassah,” sources in the hospital said.
A spokesperson for the prison service this week stated in response to a query from Haaretz: “He is not in the custody of the IPS. He was released in 2021.”In a home in the half-wrecked Jenin refugee camp this week, hopes were soaring, even when a view from outside suggests that they are false hopes. None of this need happen if Israel were to desist from its barbaric and inhumane practice of refusing to return bodies of Palestinians.
And meanwhile, on Wednesday night, an army unit penetrated the camp and arrested eight elderly men who were gathered in a pharmacy in the camp. One of them was Jamal Zubeidi.
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