Writing on Time.com, Tim McKirk has a touching story about three Palestinian sisters – Jinan age 6, Dania age 4 and Noor age 2 – taking a trip to visit their father in an Israeli prison. Their father, Ali, has been held in an Israeli prison for two years without trial. He has been charged with weapons possession and the family home in the West Bank town Qalqilya was demolished by the Israeli military even though no weapons were ever found. Their mother, Salam, is not able to travel with her daughters because she is on Israeli security watch list, although she has never been told why. From the story “Visiting Daddy in Prison: A Palestinian Ordeal“:
Qalqilya is encircled by Israel’s security barrier, and at a checkpoint, the three girls dismount with the rest of the Palestinian passengers and are herded through a labyrinth of turnstiles, flashing lights, metal detectors and an X-ray machine that swallows up the Barbie backpack. Jinan and her sisters squirm through a turnstile too early and are stranded in a security no-man’s land, and yelled at by the disembodied voices of soldiers watching through closed-circuit cameras. When the girls finally emerge dazed from the checkpoint, Jinan bursts over to a field of wildflowers and plucks a stem of Queen Anne’s Lace for her little sister.
Then the girls clamber aboard another ICRC bus, which is escorted to the prison by Israeli police. Skipping up the aisle, Jinan touches a man’s bald head and asks: “What happened to your hair? Mine’s soft and pretty.” She snatches my cell-phone and, within five seconds, has snapped a photo of a napping Palestinian woman and turned it into my screen-saver.
Two hours later, the bus arrives at the high walls of Chattah-Gilboa prison. Nearly a thousand Palestinians have been waiting up to five hours, in shrinking shade, for the 45 minutes they will spend speaking with their relatives on a telephone from behind thick glass. The glass has small holes that allow the prisoners to touch fingertips with their visitors. Jinan and Dania climb the metal bars of the turnstile as if it were a piece of playground equipment. A buzzer blares and a light over the turnstile flashes from red to green. A guard calls out a few names, and the eager crowd pushes Jinan and her sisters aside.
This is some great writing from McGirk. Part of what makes this story significant is how incredibly ordinary it is. This is life in a police state. Three siblings under the age of seven have to face the full power of the Israeli occupation by themselves to simply visit their father. The article points out an important point that Israel takes Palestinians out of the occupied territories and detains them inside Israel. This is illegal under international law. Among other things, this practice makes it much more difficult for family members to visit their detained relatives.
Jinan, Dania and Noor’s father is just one of over 10,000 Palestinians currently being held by Israel. Many of those prisoners are like Ali and are being detained indefinitely without trial. Some are being held in administrative detention where they don’t even know the charges against them. McGirk points out that the issue of Palestinian prisoners releases “remain at the center of most Israeli-Palestinian political negotiations.” This story shows why.
