Israel brands Palestinian detainees in West Bank with numbers on their foreheads

When Israel re-arrested Palestinian men in the occupied West Bank town of Dura, the detainees faced familiar treatment.

They were blindfolded, handcuffed, insulted and kept in inhumane conditions. More unusual was that each man had a number written on his forehead.

The Israeli army launched a massive arrest campaign in Dura, south of Hebron, on Thursday morning, targeting more than 20 former prisoners.

Among them were several prominent Hamas activists who Israel had previously detained after the outbreak of the war on Gaza and had released from prison a few months ago.

Osama Shaheen, who was released in August after 10 months of administrative detention, told Middle East Eye that soldiers brutally stormed his house, smashing his furniture.

They took him to a military vehicle, blindfolded and handcuffed him, and placed him with other detainees in the house of Nayef Rjoub, a former member of the Palestinian Authority’s parliament, the Palestinian Legislative Council.

“I was interrogated violently and beaten on various parts of my body, especially my head and chest,” Shaheen said.

“The soldiers turned us from names into numbers, and every detainee had a number that they used to provoke him during his arrest and call him by number instead of name. To them, we are just numbers.”

Ayed Dudin, a paramedic who was released from Israeli prison in July, said soldiers had stormed his home too, wreaking havoc. However, Dudin was out, providing medical support to people wounded by the raid, so the Israelis took his son Mohammed instead.

“I received a phone call from an officer in the Israeli army and he asked me to surrender myself so that my son would be released. Although I went to do so, they didn’t release Mohammad and kept him detained with me,” Dudin told MEE.

Dudin said he was also subjected to beatings and abuse while detained in Rjoub’s house, which the soldiers provocatively raised an Israeli flag over.

He, too, had a number written on his forehead.

In the nearby village of Tabaqa, the Israelis turned another Palestinian home into a detention and interrogation centre, where residents endured similar treatment.

During the raid, which lasted 11 hours, soldiers also distributed leaflets and posters bearing threatening warnings not to attack the army or Israeli settlers.

New methods of intimidation

Arrest campaigns are near daily in the West Bank. 

While Israeli troops hunt specific targets, they often sweep up former prisoners at the same time, which Palestinians say is a way of intimidating them and exerting pressure on their communities.

When the troops storm West Bank towns and villages, life is completely shut down. Snipers are deployed on buildings while streets are flooded with soldiers and military vehicles that prevent the movement of local residents.

In Dura, all schools were suspended on Thursday due to the raid.

Imad Abu Hawash, an activist from the Palestine Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), told MEE that these raids are increasingly becoming longer, lasting for hours at a time and terrorising Palestinians in their homes, which are often ransacked.

According to the PCHR, most detainees are beaten during these campaigns, and the Israeli army is trying new steps to intimidate them.

“Usually, a Palestinian is arrested and transferred to a known interrogation centre where he is interrogated. But the Israeli soldiers have replaced that with these humiliating measures, and they say that they have the right to detain any person for six hours without reporting him as a detainee to the Israeli army,” Abu Hawash said.