Kim Hjelmgaard and Suha Husein | USA TODAY
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Farhat is doing his best to accept that his family could be seriously injured or even killed in the coming days.
A week ago, the electrician was arrested by Israeli police as he prepared to work in Ashkelon, a city in southern Israel near the Gaza Strip – where he is from and where his family lives.
He says he was blindfolded, his wrists bound and falsely accused of killing Israeli women and children. Eventually he was put on a bus and deported to the West Bank, the landlocked area that makes up most of the Palestinian territories.
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As Israel’s military operation to root out Hamas and its members who massacred civilians on the country’s southern border on October 7 gathers momentum, its forces are gradually reducing entire neighborhoods in Gaza to rubble. Water, food, electricity and medicine are running out. Morgues are overcrowded.
Palestinians, international aid groups and reports from hospitals in Gaza say more than 47 families, including 500 civilians, have already been wiped out in Gaza by Israeli bombing. And for this reason, because of their own harsh treatment by the Israeli authorities and their long, violent and bitter shared history with the country, Palestinians like Farhat and others in the broader community find it difficult to denounce the attacks on Israel, even though they say they do that they do not condone violence against civilians.
“Killing someone is wrong,” a Palestinian said on Saturday, speaking to friends in downtown Ramallah.
“But imagine you live somewhere and I come and lock you in your house. I control everything that comes in and out of your home. Occasionally I’ll come and spank you. At some point you will resist and start fighting back with everything.” You have. This is what is happening,” he said of the Hamas attacks.
Israel claims it controls access to the Gaza Strip for security reasons.
“I’m powerless to help them and every ten times I try to reach them on the phone, I get through maybe once,” Farhat, 60, said on Saturday, speaking about his wife, 12 children and “many grandchildren”. Grounds of a school in Ramallah. There are 130 Palestinian workers from Gaza there, deported with him from Israel, were temporarily accommodated in a large hall. USA TODAY could not independently verify their reports, but all had similar stories of detentions and evictions. The Israel Prison Service did not respond to a request for comment.
The full names of the men at the school spoken to for this story are being withheld, at their request, for their own safety. Other names of Palestinians are withheld to limit potential damage to their professional reputation.
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‘Where can we go? We are all under attack’
The school hall in Ramallah was filled with floor mats arranged in neat rows, crumpled sleeping bags, discarded plastic water bottles and dozens of pacing men – just men – saying they simply had no idea how to help themselves or their families, let alone because reunite with them.
“I don’t care if I die,” said Imad, 58, another Palestinian electrician from Gaza who was deported to the West Bank with Farhat. He has eight children and also looks after several more of his son, who died several years ago after a battle with cancer. Farat said he was never sure whether his family members were alive or dead.
Hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing south of Gaza, near Egypt, with whatever they can carry and whatever means of transport they can find. Since fuel is scarce, some resort to horse-drawn carts.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, more than 2,700 Palestinians have been killed since fighting broke out, Israeli air strikes result in fatalities every five minutes.
Almost 10,000 people in the Gaza Strip, half of them women and children, were injured. According to the United Nations, up to 50,000 pregnant women lack access to basic health care. So far Israel has not allowed any help. It says it wants to release Hamas prisoners first. Egypt was unwilling to open its border to fleeing Gazans.
“Where can we go? We are all under attack,” Imad’s wife Hayat said when reached by telephone in Khan Younis, a southern Gaza town, on Saturday. The city has swelled to over a million residents as the Israeli military warned Palestinian civilians to leave the northern Gaza Strip ahead of an expected ground offensive against Hamas.
Khan Younis normally has a population of around 400,000 people.
“They cursed us and treated us like animals”
Many Palestinians drew attention to their injured wrists at school in Ramallah.
The result, they said, were cable ties placed on them by Israeli police. For years, Israel has pursued a controversial policy of “administrative detention,” which allows authorities to detain Palestinians of all ages without trial and under accusations of secrecy. Israel says the tactic is necessary to contain dangerous militants the government believes may be terrorists.
Human rights groups argue that the practice amounts to extrajudicial detention and punishment.
Farhat and Imad said police denied them use of the toilet while in custody.
They showed photos on their cellphones taken by eyewitnesses of them kneeling blindfolded before police and other Israeli security services. They said the younger men among them were beaten, but also said some Israeli soldiers tried to intervene to prevent this.
“They cursed us, treated us like animals and accused us of killing (Israeli) children – of being responsible for (the attacks in Israel) and the events in Gaza,” Farhat said.
“Piss your pants if you have to, the Israeli soldiers told us,” Imad said.
A third man at the school who listened to Imad’s speech said he and his wife, who was in Gaza, decided it would be best if she died in her own home rather than evacuating to the south.
“There is no safe place in Gaza,” he said. “Every place is targeted. The worst part of this whole experience for me is that I’m here but my mind is back there,” he said.
Earlier on Saturday, it was revealed that the entire family of another Palestinian worker who lived at the school had been killed in the Israeli bombing of Gaza. He became so emotional and angry that he was taken to a clinic to be given sedatives.
Minors were shot in the head, chest and stomach
The school where the workers were housed caters for 800 children from kindergarten to high school.
The principal said some parents were concerned that the men’s presence could lead to a raid by the Israeli military or an attack by Jewish settlers in the West Bank seeking revenge for the 1,400 Israelis killed when Hamas crossed the border from Gaza to Gaza Israel attacks and kidnaps civilians and soldiers.
The Israeli settlers live in West Bank communities that are illegal under international law. These settlements will be built on Palestinian land in Palestinian-ruled territory that the Israeli military has occupied since its victory in the 1967 war with Arab countries.
“Today no one can say what these settlers will do,” the director said, refers to the communities that expanded under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and which some Israelis are opposed to.
“They seem to be free to do and kill whoever they please.”
Since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out more than a week ago, at least 56 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,100 others injured in settler attacks and confrontations with the Israeli military in the West Bank, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.
Among those killed were minors who were shot in the head, chest and stomach, according to Palestinian activists.
On Friday alone, a traditional day of protests, at least 14 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinians near roads leading to checkpoints. Some were killed by settlers.
A refusal to condemn Hamas
Many of the Palestinians USA TODAY met in Ramallah and surrounding West Bank areas said that while they reject the idea of using force against civilians, Israelis or anyone else, they do not believe or feel it is their responsibility to do so Strongly condemn or reject Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians.
Many also do not consider Hamas a terrorist organization, even though it has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union. They see it as an act of self-defense against Israeli military actions.
Hamas is the de facto ruler of Gaza.
This refusal to condemn Hamas – a group that believes Israel should not exist – has angered the Israeli public and much of international opinion, as reports and gory details of Hamas executions and kidnappings of Israeli civilians emerged. Among those kidnapped are elderly women and small children. Israel estimates that around 200 people, including police and soldiers, are being held hostage by Hamas. Fourteen Americans remain missing, but it is unclear how many may be held hostage.
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Human rights groups say they are pursuing evidence of war crimes committed by both sides. Israel’s indiscriminate military campaign and “total siege of the Gaza Strip” – withholding water, food, electricity and fuel – amounts to “collective punishment” for Palestinian civilians, according to the United Nations. Both Israel and Hamas insist they operate within international law.
“We are at war. “We are defending our homes,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said at a media briefing on Friday. “That’s the truth. And when a nation protects its homeland, it fights. And we will fight until we break her back.”
In an interview with The Economist magazine last week, Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas leader, said his group’s operation in Israel targeted only “military posts.”
The official news agency of the Palestinian Authority, which exercises civilian control of the West Bank, published comments from President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday criticizing Hamas over its actions. A reference to Hamas was later removed without explanation.
On Monday, the news agency published comments from Abbas in which he rejected the killing of civilians on both sides and called for the release of civilians, prisoners and detainees on both sides. He didn’t mention Hamas.
“I will not condemn Hamas”
On the outskirts of Ramallah, a 25-year-old graduate student took a break from her studies at a cafe in an upscale commercial area. She is studying for a master’s degree‘He has a degree in international law and wants to specialize in defending the human rights of Palestinians.
She was born in Chicago and has dual citizenship.
She said there are a variety of reasons why Palestinians like her find it difficult to criticize Hamas.
Among them: Palestinians feel that for decades they have lived in a world where Israeli attacks on them are not similarly publicly reprimanded; because millions of Palestinians lack basic rights due to Israel’s ongoing military occupation, which imposes onerous restrictions on their freedom of movement, controls their water resources, subjects them to forced evictions, police harassment, arbitrary detentions and numerous other everyday indignities; because Israeli violations of international law with its settlements and military actions are simply dismissed; and because Israel has slowly taken over more and more Palestinian land while ministers in Netanyahu’s government have openly called for an ethical cleansing of Palestinian civilians.
“It hurts me that America supports Israel so much,” she said.
“I will not condemn Hamas (for its attacks on Israeli civilians in the south) because Israel has been violating our rights for years. They have killed thousands in Gaza in several wars. What happened was a result of her own actions. We have the right to defend ourselves and this is the first time we have done so.”
She said some of the images and videos she had seen on social media about Hamas’ brutality in Israel were “harsh.” However, she did not believe that these images and videos represented the “real Hamas,” but rather just the actions of individual bad actors. She said pregnant women and babies in Gaza were routinely killed by Israeli bombs.
“We don’t want them to die,” she said of the Israelis. “We want them to disappear from our country.”
A few tables away, a Palestinian who lives in the United States and works for a well-known US technology company said that he also did not think it appropriate to condemn Hamas for its attack on Israelis.
“Being a Palestinian, They face systematic violence on a daily basis,” he said.
“Much of it is invisible to the outside world. But literally two hills from our location is an illegally occupied settlement. They call them ‘settlements.'” But that’s actually too harmless a word. It is actually a colony. Palestinians are surrounded by extremists who are colonizing our land.”
He said Americans and others who don’t know the region very well need to understand that “there is a context (to the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7) that is much larger than a single event.”
Israel withdrew from its Gaza settlements in 2005 and has since fought several wars with Hamas there.
Support for Hamas could increase
On Saturday evening, USA TODAY briefly visited a hillside on the outskirts of Ramallah near a giant bronze statue of South African anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, where groups of Palestinians had gathered.
They chatted excitedly as they sat around small fires and ate seeds and nuts.
They also scanned the horizon for signs of Hamas rockets fired from Gaza toward Tel Aviv, their lights glimmering about 25 miles away. Over the course of an hour, no one flew by.
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Less than a mile away, a green laser sight emanating from a neighboring Israeli settlement scanned the same hill, its beam occasionally stopping in the bushes about a hundred meters below the vantage point.
A man watching remarked that he thought it was an Israeli sniper looking for Palestinian intruders.
Khaldoun Barghouti, a Ramallah-based Palestinian researcher and analyst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said he believes Israel’s decision to bomb Gaza, killing hundreds of civilians and causing widespread destruction, is leading to more support for Hamas among Palestinians have led.
He said it “turned the blame on Hamas (for the attacks in Israel) into even more anger toward Israel.”
In the United States on Sunday, a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy died after being stabbed in Illinois. Authorities believe the attack was a response to the war between Israel and Hamas. Attorney General Merrick Garland warned that the incident would raise fears of hate violence among Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities.
Several European countries have increased protections for Jewish communities due to the rise in anti-Semitic violence following Hamas attacks on Israel.
“They don’t know we’re here.” If they did, I think they’d kill us.
Farhat, Imad and the other Palestinians from Gaza at the school who found refuge after being deported from Israel were moved on Sunday to Jericho, a Palestinian West Bank city in the Jordan Valley.
When they weren’t trying to check on their families Saturday, they spent most of their time staring at video clips on their cellphones showing the effects of Israeli bombing.
Weak children are brought to hospitals half-dead. Streams of exhausted-looking Gazans are streaming into Khan Younis, a town in the southern Gaza Strip, only to find incredibly cramped conditions.
They collected names of Palestinians, work colleagues in Israel, whom they had not seen since their arrest.
They were worried about what had happened to them.
A man named Mahmoud tried to solve another seemingly insurmountable problem.
He said a relative and a friend of the man, neighbors in Gaza, were hiding in a room in southern Israel where they were working in a kitchen. They had been there since the first day of the Hamas attack and now feared that if they ventured outside they would, The Israeli military would consider them militants.
They shared their Israeli work permits to prove their identity.
They weren’t sure what to do. They might try to sneak out.
“They don’t know we’re here. If they knew, I think they would kill us,” one of the men said in a phone call with USA TODAY. They did not want their location or identity to be made public.
He estimated they had enough food and water for another three days.