Jerusalem was still relatively open when Huda first arrived in Sawahre. She was able to send her children to school in the city. Below the age of twelve, they didn’t need a blue ID to enter. But over time the restrictions grew, and from one day to the next Jerusalem was closed off. On one occasion, the school buses had no way to bring the students home to Sawahre. Huda and half the parents of the village spent the afternoon searching for their children, who finally showed up at sunset, after walking for several hours. Huda immediately took them out of their Jerusalem schools.
It was a fateful decision. Until then, Hadi had lived up to his name. He was a quiet boy who rarely got into trouble. That changed when he was sent to a new school in Abu Dis, which was home to al-Quds University and the site of frequent clashes with Israeli soldiers. During the Second Intifada, in late 2003, Israel erected the separation wall through Abu Dis, causing merchants, whose income relied heavily on customers from Jerusalem, to lose business. Shops closed, land values dropped by more than half, rental prices by nearly a third, and those who could afford to moved away.
Israeli troops were stationed outside Hadi’s school practically every day. To Huda, their presence seemed designed to provoke the students so as to arrest as many of them as possible. The soldiers would stop them on their way out of classes, line them up against the wall, frisk them, and sometimes beat them, too.
In her work at the UNRWA camps around the West Bank, Huda saw things that made her afraid for her sons. She had witnessed a soldier shoot a boy who threw a stone at a tank. The soldiers stopped her from going to help him as he fell to the ground. At home in Sawahre, listening to the nightly news of West Bank killings and closures, she had trouble sleeping. She knew Hadi was out throwing stones.
The stress began to show in her body. It started with headaches that became severe. Then at work one day she had the sensation of cold liquid inside her head. She had double vision and difficulty walking. Back home in Sawahre, she took a nap, waking up twenty-four hours later. Huda understood that she had been in a coma, a sign that she might have a cerebral hemorrhage. The Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank and East Jerusalem weren’t equipped to perform the operation, she was told. She couldn’t afford treatment in Israel. Finally she obtained a letter from Arafat promising to cover 90 percent of the 50,000 shekels in costs and brought it to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem.
The surgery was a success, but the stress that had possibly caused the hemorrhage only intensified. One Sunday in May 2004, when Hadi was fifteen and a half, he and his friends were shot at by Israeli Border Police, a gendarmerie that operated under the command of the army when in Abu Dis and of the police when in annexed East Jerusalem. Eyewitnesses told the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem and the AFP news agency that the boys had not taken part in any hostilities. Hadi told his mother that they had been minding their own business, drinking Cokes, when the soldiers started to fire at them as if in a sort of game. One of the bullets hit Hadi’s friend, who was sitting right beside him. The boy was killed immediately.
After that, Hadi confronted the soldiers with new determination. Huda would see him and his friends in the street, recognizing him despite the black-and-white kaffiyeh covering his face. She kept her distance, though, not wanting the soldiers to see she was his mother and then come to their home to arrest him at night. But her efforts failed to protect him. Less than a year after Hadi’s friend was shot, Israeli jeeps and armored vehicles surrounded Huda’s home. Troops approached from all sides and banged loudly on the door. Huda knew why they had come.
Hadi was sixteen. Huda wanted to delay the inevitable, to have a few more seconds with her boy, so she ignored the banging, opening the door only when the soldiers began kicking at it. They had their weapons trained on her as she asked what they wanted, tears silently running down her face.
“We want Hadi,” one of the soldiers said. Huda demanded to know the accusation. “Your son knows,” she was told.
“I’m his mother. I want to know.” They ignored her.
Thirteen-year-old Ahmad came with her as she led the way to Hadi’s room. Ahmad told his mother not to cry; it would only make it harder for Hadi. Huda tried to contain her fear, knowing that any attempt to stop the soldiers from taking Hadi could put his life in danger. She imagined them killing him there in front of her, saying that it was in self-defense. Huda wanted to hug Hadi, but if she touched him she would fall apart. She asked the soldiers to let him take a winter coat. It was still cold. Where would she be able to find him, she wanted to know; she was told to come see him in the morning in the nearby settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. She watched them put zip ties around his wrists, pushing him out the door and through the garden toward one of the jeeps. It felt as if her heart had left with him.
For two weeks, Huda drove from one detention facility to another in search of Hadi, from Ma’ale Adumim to Ofer prison to Moscobiya in Jerusalem to Gush Etzion, using her UNWRA work permit to pass checkpoints and enter settlements barred to green ID holders. But she never saw Hadi and was unable to learn where he was being held. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t laugh, couldn’t smile. She couldn’t bring herself to prepare any of the dishes that Hadi liked. She didn’t want to leave her house or go anywhere she might be forced to carry on a normal conversation, as if she weren’t in the deepest grief, as if Hadi were not gone.
Huda retained a Palestinian lawyer with a blue ID who charged $3,000. Ismail refused to pay. He blamed Hadi and Huda for the arrest. Why had Hadi been out throwing stones and not at school? Why hadn’t she stopped him? For Huda, this was more than she could bear. If Ismail was unwilling to act as a father, she no longer wanted him in her life. Quoting a passage from the Quran in which Khader, a servant of God, parts with Moses, she asked for a divorce. If you refuse to grant it, she said, I will tell everyone that you’re not a nationalist and you won’t support your son. Huda saw that she had frightened him, and Ismail agreed to give her the divorce.
After two weeks, the lawyer called to say that Hadi was being held at a detention center in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, south of Bethlehem, and would soon have a hearing at the military court at the Ofer prison, between Jerusalem and Ramallah. He was lucky to get a hearing so early, she was told. Other parents waited for three, four, and five months before their children were brought to trial and they could see them.
Huda was instructed to come early for a thorough security check. After waiting for several hours, she entered a cramped courtroom. Only the military judge, the prosecutor, Hadi, his lawyer, a translator, and a few soldiers and security officers were present. The chances of Hadi being released were nonexistent; the military court’s conviction rate was 99.7 percent. For children charged with throwing stones, the rate was even higher: of the 835 children accused in the six years following Hadi’s arrest, 834 were convicted, nearly all of whom served time in jail. Hundreds of them were twelve to fifteen years old.
Just before the hearing began, Huda learned that Hadi had confessed to throwing stones and writing anti-occupation graffiti. She was told that it was forbidden to speak to Hadi or attempt to touch him—the judge would throw her out if she tried. When Hadi was brought into the courtroom, he was chained at the leg to another prisoner. Huda managed to stay silent but gasped softly as she saw a large burn mark on his face. Now crying, Huda stood up and through the translator demanded a halt to the proceedings. She was a doctor, she said, and could see that her son had been tortured.
The IDF judge barked at her to be quiet and sit back down. Huda refused, insisting that Hadi lift his shirt and lower his pants so the court could see that his confession had been extracted under torture. The judge allowed it. Hadi’s body was covered with bruises, as if he had been beaten with batons. Huda shouted that the soldiers who tortured him should be tried. As the judge adjourned the hearing, Huda rushed to her son, ignoring the yelling of the guards, and gave Hadi the hug she had suppressed on the night of his arrest. She imagined warming him with her hug ahead of his stay in the cold prison cell. The judge bellowed: this would be the last time she would touch her son until he was released.
Hadi’s lawyer, who encouraged the family to take whatever deal was offered, brought a proposal for nineteen months in jail, with a reduction to sixteen months for a fee of 3,000 shekels, just over $1,000. The sentence was lighter than that received by some of Hadi’s friends and classmates; about twenty of them, ranging in age from twelve to sixteen, had been arrested at the same time. A number of the students had blue IDs, and their sentences were roughly twice as long as the others. There was a condition attached to the deal: Huda had to drop any claims against the soldiers who had tortured Hadi. In any case, the lawyer said, there was no chance of the soldiers being prosecuted. No one would testify against them. Hadi took the deal.
He was transferred to the Naqab prison, where Huda visted him as often as she could. Whatever she brought for Hadi, she would bring for the other inmates as well. They were teenage boys, many of them quite poor. On her UNRWA salary, she could afford to give them gifts that their parents could not. She brought books, hoping they would help keep up the boys’ spirits. Hadi’s friends would tell her the names of the girls they loved, and she came back with the initials inscribed on grains of rice. On one holiday, she arrived with a tapestry of a blue sky and stars for the ceiling of their tent.
Huda spent nearly twenty-four hours traveling for each short, forty-minute visit. The relatives would sit on one side of a glass partition, the prisoners on the other. Some inmates were not permitted visits by their wives or parents or children over fifteen, and others were forbidden visits altogether. The prisoners and their relatives would speak to one another through a small hole in the glass, the voices barely audible on the other side. Only young children were allowed to make physical contact. Huda would watch as mothers pushed reluctant boys and girls to embrace fathers who had become strangers. The children cried and the fathers wept, too.
Hadi’s year and a half in prison was the hardest stretch of time in Huda’s life, harder even than witnessing the bloodshed and grief in Tunis in 1985. It opened her eyes to a hidden universe of suffering that touched nearly every Palestinian home. A little over a year after Hadi’s release, a UN report found that some 700,000 Palestinians had been arrested since the occupation began, equal to roughly 40 percent of all the men and boys in the territories. The damage wasn’t only to the affected families, each of them grieving lost years and lost childhoods. It was to the entire society, to every mother, father, and grandparent, all of whom knew or would come to learn that they were powerless to protect their children.