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Amidst the joy of being released after 20 months of torture Israel In prisons, Mohammed Abu Moussa could tell something was wrong.
Others were released from the bus that brought him palestinian The 45-year-old medical technician, a 45-year-old medical technician who was among the captives in Gaza last week, was reunited with his wife and two young children. But when he asked about their mother, his brother did not make eye contact with him.
Eventually they sat her down and told her: her mother, her younger sister Aya, Aya’s children, and her aunt and uncle had all been killed in an Israeli airstrike on their shelter in central Gaza in July.
More than 1,800 Palestinians captured by Israeli troops from Gaza during the two-year war were freed this week under a ceasefire agreement. Hamas‘Release of the last surviving hostages. Israel also released about 250 Palestinian prisoners convicted in previous decades, who returned mainly to the occupied West Bank or were deported abroad, although some were deported to Gaza.
Those left back in Gaza faced the trauma of how their homeland was destroyed and their families torn apart by Israeli bombings and attacks, while they were locked in with little news of the war.
Describing his return, Abu Moussa said the grief had already arrived before the detainees who were released on Monday got off the bus. Some people shouted from the bus windows to people they knew from the welcoming crowd and asked about brothers, mothers and fathers.
Often, he said, his answer was brief: “God May his soul rest in peace.”
his family ran away
Abu Moussa suffered his first loss soon after Israel launched its campaign aimed at destroying Hamas following the terrorists’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Eight days later, an airstrike hit his family home in the town of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza while he was on duty at Nasser Hospital, where he worked as a radiology technician. Videos circulating online at the time showed him and his wife Rawan Salha running around the hospital looking for their son Yusuf, among the casualties. “He is 7 years old, with curly hair, fair skin and handsome,” Salha said, crying.
The boy was brought dead. The wife of one of Abu Moussa’s brothers and his two children were also killed in the attack.
Over the following months, Abu Moussa worked tirelessly as injured people poured into the hospital, where Salha and her two surviving children were also taking shelter along with hundreds of others driven from their homes. In February 2024, Israeli forces surrounded the hospital, preparing to storm the hospital to search for suspected terrorists. He demanded everyone to leave, but the condition of the staff and patients was so serious that he had to leave.
But Salha refused to leave without Abu Moussa, he said. So they set out on foot with their children. At a nearby Israeli military checkpoint, Abu Moussa was called for questioning along with others at a nearby stadium.
This was the beginning of a long separation from his family.
abuse in prisons
Abu Moussa says that his many months in Israeli prisons were filled with abuse. Like other detainees released back to Gaza on Monday, he was never charged.
It started in the stadium, where he said he was beaten with sticks and punches during interrogation. All those captured at the checkpoint were kept with their hands bound in zip ties for three days, denied water and not allowed to use the bathroom. “Almost all of us soiled ourselves,” Abu Moussa said.
He was taken to Sde Teiman, a military prison camp inside Israel, where he would be held for two months. Every day, detainees were forced to kneel for hours without moving – “It’s exhausting, you feel like your back is broken,” he said. Abu Moussa said that guards singled some out for beatings and that he suffered a broken rib in one of the beatings.
He was taken to the Negev prison run by civilian authorities. Fighting there was rare, he said, mainly when guards searched the cells weekly, he said.
But the conditions were harsh, he said. Almost all the prisoners had scabies, an infection caused by skin-biting mites. “People were rubbing themselves against the walls trying to get rid of the itch,” he said. Despite requests, prison officials did not provide the treatment cream to detainees until a few weeks before their release, he said.
Bedding was dirty and prisoners were not allowed to change clothes. The cuts often become infected, he said. When he washed his one set of clothes, he had to strip naked and wrap himself in a blanket — but if the guards watched, “they took away the blanket and let you sleep without it,” he said.
Sick detainees or those with serious conditions asked for medicines but were refused, he said. One man, Mohammed al-Astal, suffered a blockage in the colon, which worsened and ultimately led to his death, Abu Moussa said.
“They treated us like animals,” he said.
Asked about Abu Moussa’s account, the Israeli prison service, which operates the Negev prison, said it was not aware of it. It said it operated in accordance with the law and that prisoners’ rights to medical care and decent living conditions were upheld.
In response, the military denied systematic abuses at its facilities and said it acted in accordance with Israeli and international law. It said it investigates any substantive complaints.
Abu Moussa’s description mirrors the descriptions of many previously released Palestinians. At least 75 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons and detention facilities during the war, the United Nations said in a report last month, saying conditions in the facilities were torture-like leading to the deaths. A 17-year-old Palestinian who died in prison in March was found to have been ravaged by hunger and had inflammation and itching in his colon, according to an Israeli doctor who oversaw an autopsy.
return to destruction
“The first shock was the destruction,” said Abu Moussa, crossing the border from Israel into Gaza after the release.
His hometown of Khan Yunis was unrecognizable. The entire neighborhood was destroyed. He and his fellow travelers searched for sites among the ruined buildings.
The buses stopped at Nasir Hospital, where a crowd was waiting for them. Alarmed at not seeing him in the crowd, Abu Moussa asked a colleague at the hospital where his wife and children were. They assured him they were inside, waiting.
He asked one of his brothers about his mother. The brother could not look Abu Moussa in the eyes and only said, “She is coming.”
“He was not talking to me directly,” Abu Moussa said. After reuniting with his wife and children, he again asked about his mother and sister Aya. Finally, they told him.
Recalling what happened, Abu Moussa remained silent for a long time, overwhelmed with emotion. Her voice breaking with tears, she recalled how her mother had always been strong, refusing to cry after one of her brothers was killed during the 2009 Israel-Hamas war.
“She always held her own, so we all wouldn’t be weak,” he said.
He wondered whether his mother’s happiness would have been shattered if she had seen him return from captivity.
“I miss her. I want to see her,” he cried. “I want to kiss her hand, her head.”
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Keith reported from Cairo. AP correspondent Sarah El Deeb in Cairo contributed to this report.