Hanin al Masaeed was praying when the Israeli army brutally invaded her home to arrest her. “I thought it was a routine raid. Why me? She had not done anything,” she recalls about that early morning of November 10. Blindfolded and hands tied, she was left lying on the floor of her home, the Aida refugee camp, in the occupied West Bank for three hours.
“You should be in Gaza,” they told him. With that threat, this 29-year-old Palestinian, a singer of folklore and patriotic songs, began an 18-day journey of Israeli torture “that seemed like 18 years to me.” On the car ride to the first detention center, Hanin says a soldier played loud Hebrew music in her ear and put tape on her face.
“I started crying, it hurt me. He hurt me above all that he did something like that,” because he managed to make Hanin, with a flirtatious taste, lose half of his eyebrows. He holds back, and emphasizes that “under the occupation, everyone can be detained. “You can’t be free without paying a price.” For Israel, theirs took the form of an administrative detention, without formal charges or trial, due to “Facebook.”
This is the only thing they revealed to him during his interrogation: that he had shared a post in support of the strip. “The hardest days of my life” would later come in the Hasharon prison, he denounces, where every day of the four he was in “they took us to the bathroom to hit us hard, also on our feet, and to search us because there were no cameras.”
Hanin's mother listens with sadness to the youngest of her five children, with a harmonious voice. Her story, however, is missing two more transfers: another center and Damon's prison, both full of men, minors and women. She insists that “every prisoner has his story.” But after the Hamas attacks of October 7, she speaks of an Israeli prison system to which few lawyers today have access and which, motivated by revenge, has cut “privileges.”
In the center, for example, Hanin saw how soldiers forced prisoners to dance in front of an Israeli flag; “And in Damon they only let us out of a cell with six women for 15 minutes. There was no kitchen anymore, they gave us something raw as if we were animals. “There were sick people inside, but they didn’t care.”
“Are you afraid of being arrested again?” I ask her. The young woman from Aida, a point of Palestinian cultural resistance, smilingly replies that she is not and alludes to “God's destiny.” God and two cats that slid through the bars like the ones in her house do, “and that we fed so as not to lose humanity,” supported her in the end. Also the birds from the window.
“We went through many difficulties. But I imagined myself being a bird in a cage, I wanted to just fly away. The day I was released, I swear it was like a bird gave me that news. I saw birds fly in the sky,” Hanin opens, still not believing that his name was part of the ceasefire agreement at the end of November between Israel and Hamas.
It is the only thing that breaks his optimism: “I will never forget that we left Gaza for blood.” That and now it is her friend Laila who “replaces” her in an Israeli prison for the same reason.
