‘They tried to freeze me to death’: torture and resistance in Israeli prisons
Mohammad Ibrahim Ali al-Deirawi and his wife Ghadeer
Mohammad al-Deirawi & Ramzy Baroud write in The Palestine Chronicle:
Mohammad Ibrahim Ali al-Deirawi was born on January 30, 1978 in Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. His family is originally from Bir Al-Saba’, an ethnically cleansed Palestinian town located in the southern Naqab desert. Mohammad was arrested by the Israeli army at a military checkpoint in central Gaza on March 1, 2001. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison for his role in the armed Palestinian resistance, and was freed on October 18, 2011 in a prisoner exchange between the Palestinian resistance and Israel.
Mohammad’s interrogation commenced as soon as he arrived at the Central Asqalan (Ashkelon) Prison in southern Israel, where he experienced physical and psychological torture for nearly two and a half months. He was handed his sentence by an Israeli military court on March 20, 2003.
As soon as he was released from the Nafha Prison, 100 kilometers north of Bir Al-Saba’, he married Ghadeer, the beautiful and only daughter of his prison-mate, Majdi Hammad. Ghadeer and Mohammad have two children.
Majdi Hammad was born on March 20, 1965 in the Jabaliya refugee camp, the most crowded and dilapidated of all of Gaza’s refugee camps, and the birthplace of the First Palestinian Intifada, the popular uprising of 1987. Hammad’s family originated from the ethnically cleansed village of Barbara, in southern Palestine. Majdi was the youngest of two brothers and one sister, Fathi, Akram and Fayza. Majdi was raised mostly by his mother, Farida, known for her strong religious principles, strong character and leadership in the community.
Majdi was arrested several times, the last and longest of his prison terms being in 1991. Then, he was sentenced to 624 years in prison for his leadership role in the armed resistance and, particularly, in the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas organization.