It’s routine by now: Israeli troops burst in, humiliate a Palestinian family and detain a man without trial
The town of Dura in December 2024.
Gideon Levy reports in Haaretz on 22 February 2025:
The story is repeated day after day, night after night, in the West Bank. A large group of Israel Defense Forces soldiers burst into a home, accompanied by dogs. They have come to arrest a “wanted individual,” who in some cases is merely an innocent person who, at most, published a post that the occupation regime disliked. The operation has no legal justification – typically, there’s no arrest warrant, nothing. The outcome might be long months of incarceration without a trial.
So, the term “abduction” is apt. In these cases, it is always carried out with excessive force, brutally, with the soldiers behaving in a crude, humiliating, and violent manner toward everyone in the household, even when they show no signs of resistance. Children and toddlers witness the terrible goings-on, as do the elderly. There are beatings, kicks, and curses; members of the household are randomly bound or handcuffed; sometimes, there is also an invasive search of the house. In extreme cases, the soldiers also open fire. The front door is frequently blown open.
Not a day passes without such events. There are precious few Palestinian families in the West Bank that haven’t undergone such experiences over the years. The number of arrests has surged since the war broke out in the Gaza Strip 16 months ago. Last weekend, for example, when Israel released 369 Palestinian prisoners as part of the first stage of the current hostage deal, 380 others were arrested, mainly in the Jenin and Tul Karm refugee camps. What happened three weeks ago in the home of the Gazaz family in Dura, not far from Hebron, was thus quite routine, another “procedure to arrest suspects.”
Dura is a backwater and its western neighborhood is particularly rundown. To get there from the south, one must now travel along a dirt road through the hills that is also a toll road: A few young Palestinians created this route because the army has blocked other roadways, and they demand a payment of 10 shekels ($2.80) per vehicle in return for warning drivers if soldiers are in the vicinity.
A 20-minute drive instead of 2 minutes. There’s no other way to access Dura from the south or from Hebron. The roads have been blocked by the IDF since October 7, like hundreds of other roads in the West Bank, which have been chopped up as never before.
We’re sitting in the yard of the Gazaz family next to their still-unfinished, spartan home. Nabil Gazaz, a farmhand of 50 with bony hands from all his manual labor, lives here with his wife and six children. None of his sons was arrested before. At 7 A.M. on Monday, January 27, troops arrived in his neighborhood. He and his wife, Kawthar, 46, a nurse’s assistant at Al-Ahli Hospital in Hebron, were both at work. Some of their children were still asleep. What happened next is recounted by Ahmed, the second-oldest, who’s 17 and has the first signs of a mustache, a high-school senior who’s preparing for his matriculation exams.
At about 10 A.M., his sister Duaa – who’s 11 and has a twin sister, Shifa – came to his room to wake him up. “There’s army in the vineyard,” she told him. “It’s in the nature of people that when you wake them up abruptly, they are not very focused at first,” Ahmed says now, waxing poetic, adding that he then rushed to look out of the small window in the front door to see whether Duaa was kidding or whether there really were soldiers in the family’s vineyard across from the house.
He saw a large number of soldiers marching along the road and thought maybe they were on the way to his uncle’s place nearby, where troops had once come to detain someone. In any event, he quickly tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to wake up his brother Mohammed, 20, who does building and renovation work. An unmuzzled dog from the IDF’s Oketz canine unit burst into the house through the unlocked door.
“I didn’t know what that dog wanted,” Ahmed says. Then came another Oketz dog, this one muzzled, followed by about 20 soldiers. The first one slapped Ahmed hard on the face, knocking him to the floor. The second dog went straight to Mohammed’s bed and pulled off the blanket. Awakening in fright, he leaped from the bed, and while running toward the back door of the house, a soldier shot him in the leg. Ahmed heard the shot and his brother’s cries.
The youngest brother, Abed, 15, was also knocked to the floor by the soldiers. They didn’t say a word about why they had invaded or who they were looking for. Ahmed and Abed were ordered to lie on the floor, face down; their hands were bound behind their back with plastic handcuffs. A soldier bent over Ahmed, his knee pressed into the young man’s back. The twins screamed in terror from their room. Another soldier started to make for their room. Ahmed told him they were girls; the soldier kicked him in response.
After about 20 minutes, an army medic arrived to tend to Mohammed’s wound. Tearing away Mohammed’s black sweatsuit, he dressed the wound. Mohammed was taken to the yard of the house almost naked, forced to lie down and, according to neighbors, was covered with Mylar foil to keep him warm. That triggered a rumor that he was dead, which was only debunked two hours later; by that time, he had been taken into custody.
Ahmed continues: “I lay on my stomach in the house and the soldier asked me in Hebrew what my name was. I didn’t understand the question and the soldier got uptight. He hit me with his rifle butt.” Ahmed was ordered to get up and was taken out to the yard. All three brothers now lay on the ground there, handcuffed. It later emerged that the troops broke Abed’s arm with their beatings, Ahmed says, while he himself suffered cracks in three ribs, also from the soldiers’ blows. Abed was blindfolded, Mohammed lay there wounded.
A soldier ordered Mohammed to talk to a Shin Bet security service agent with the phone on speaker. Ahmed heard the agent ask his brother, “Why did you run away from the army?” Mohammed replied, “I didn’t run away from the army; I ran away from the dog. I am not a wanted person. If you want, send me a summons to show up somewhere, and I will go there. Send one to my father. To my uncle.” Finally, Mohammed was placed on a stretcher and taken in a military ambulance to Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva.
At the same time, Kawthar, who was doing her shift at the hospital, heard that the army had entered Dura and that troops were outside her house. She made a video call to Mohammed, someone picked up and she could see her son lying on the ground, wounded, and her daughters shouting in the background. She rushed home by taxi, but the soldiers – and Mohammed – had already left.
Abed was left outside while the soldiers dragged Ahmed, by now blindfolded and handcuffed, about 200 meters from the house. He was ordered again to lie face-down on the ground and was kicked. He was then taken in the direction of his uncle’s house; his aunt Sausan filmed her nephew being dragged by the soldiers until they told her to go inside and shut the door.
Ahmed was placed in an army jeep and told to lie on the floor. As the vehicle set out, young people started to stone it. Ahmed tells us that for every stone that hit the jeep, he was given a kick and showered with curses. The troops let him out at an army outpost at the entrance to the Al-Fawwar refugee camp, trembling with cold in his light clothing.
The blows continued after a new shift of soldiers came on. “The second shift was worse than the first,” Ahmed says, chuckling – he recounts the whole terrible story with a smile. “You are Hamas,” the soldiers growled at him, “you are a terrorist.” Another jeep, again face down, again pummeling along the way until they got to the army base at Adorayim. He was put on the line with a Shin Bet agent. “You’re Ahmed, Mohammed’s brother?” he was asked. “You are not my target. You will be released shortly.” Where was Mohammed? “Mohammed will soon be at Soroka. His wound isn’t serious.” Why did you take him? “Because of what he posted on Instagram.” Ahmed says he told the agent he had no idea what he was talking about.
During the next jeep ride, the soldiers ordered Ahmed, who says he was tongue-tied from fear, to sing. “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya kufar, al Yahud al intisar.” Khaybar is an oasis in Saudi Arabia where Jewish tribes lived during the early era of Islam; kufar refers to heretics, intisar means victory. The soldiers probably had no idea what they were ordering him to sing – a bizarre version of a song Palestinians sing at protests, “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud, jish Muhammad suf yaoud,” roughly meaning: Khaybar, Khaybar, Jews, Mohammed’s army will yet return.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit this week stated, in response to Haaretz’s query: “During the incident in question, IDF troops were seeking to detain Mohammed Gazaz, who is suspected of dealing with stolen weapons and other offenses. When the troops arrived at his house, the suspect tried to evade detention and the troops followed the proper protocol, during which shots were fired at the suspect’s lower body. The suspect was wounded and evacuated in order to receive medical care at a hospital.
“During the incident, the suspect’s brother, who was also present, tried to resist and to leave the scene, and was therefore detained for questioning and then released.”
Eventually, the soldiers let Ahmed out of the vehicle next to a concrete army pillbox in Dura, which is supposed to help secure the road leading to the nearby settlement of Neguhot. Ahmed says he was booted out of the jeep and fell on the road. He was afraid to look up until some local Palestinians arrived and released him from the handcuffs. He called his uncle to come and pick him up. Three days later, he felt sharp pains in his chest and went to the hospital, where the cracks in his ribs were discovered.
As for Mohammed, his family contacted the Israeli NGO Hamoked – Center for the Defense of the Individual, which informed them that he had been transferred to Ofer Prison, near Ramallah, where he was ordered to serve five months of administrative detention – without charges and without a trial.
This article is reproduced in its entirety