Inside Arafat's Compound, I Fear What Awaits Us

Abed Khalil
Inter Press Service Newswire, April 2002

My name is Abed Khalil. I work as an accountant for the Palestinian Authority. We have been in Arafat's Presidential compound ever since it was surrounded by soldiers and tanks three weeks ago.

There are several hundred Palestinian Authority employees in the building. We all know that if the forty international peace activists were not here, Sharon would have already sent his men in to kill us.

Things are a little better than before. I'm most glad that they gave us cigarettes because I was having awful headaches. We have running water and there is more food. Still, one pita and a can of beans to be split between four people is not enough to survive.

No one is sleeping. During the night we all try to use the phones that work. I have not heard whether my family is dead.

I am from the Jenin refugee camp. With my grandparents and cousins, there are twenty in my family and we all lived in a two-floor house. It never felt cramped. We stayed busy.

Everything is gone now. Two nights ago I saw a picture on Al-Jazeera which showed ruins. They said it was my street, but I thought they must have made a mistake. Then I saw pieces of my friend's store. The door still had his advertising sign on it, but it was laying on top of a pile of concrete where the building used to be. I can't believe what I saw.

Last year I attended Al-Quds University in Jerusalem while I was also working. I only need one more to get my degree in accounting. I worked hard, but I stopped going to classes because the checkpoints made it impossible. Once, I almost lost my job because they held me in line for ten hours at the Al-Ram checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

Before I was a student, I was a laborer in Netanya, which is an Israeli city on the coast. I did not have a work permit, but in the villages on the border there are lots of dirt roads we would use to get into the country. Sometimes they would put boulders in the way, but we would just find another road. The work there was difficult, and they treated the Romanian and Thai workers better than the Palestinians, even those who spoke Hebrew. I stayed because my family really needed the money.

In the compound, we are all very scared about what will happen next. If I leave here, I do not know where I will go. The Israelis will probably take us away.

There is a place called Ketziot. It was so bad there that sometimes I even doubt that it ever existed.

Ketziot was a prison in the middle of the desert. It was in southern Israel, toward the Egyptian border. No one could get there. Visitors were not allowed. Not even lawyers could go there because the prisoners were called administrative detainees, which means they were held without a trial and without being charged.

The soldiers used bulldozers to push the dunes up like mountains around it. The sun there felt like someone was pouring fire on you. It was a place with no buildings, only tents with cells.

I was 14 when they sent me to Ketziot. They put me there during the first intifada for 6 months because I threw stones at the soldiers who came into our camp. I don't think you can dream a worse nightmare.

The floors of the cells at Ketziot did not sit on concrete but directly on the desert. At night when you slept, the scorpions and black snakes came in through the sand. There were no lights so you could not watch to kill them. The cell was small so you could not move away from them.

If you did not give information about people in your camp, the soldiers beat you. If you did give information, they said it proved you were a terrorist, so they kept you longer. And they beat you.

In 1995 they closed Ketziot. I watched on the news as they let the last prisoners out. I remember it made my hands tremble.

Yesterday an Israeli friend called me from B'tselem which is a human rights organization. He told me that Sharon has opened Ketziot again. My friend also told me that he had taken a report from an Israeli working there who saw troops trying to get information by breaking peoples' toes and fingers. They are now taking men from Jenin and other camps to Ketziot.

I will never go back there.

(Abed Khalil gave his story to IPS columnist Ian Urbina, who reached him by telephone from Washington, D.C. Urbina (ian.merip@verizon.net) is associate editor of the quarterly Middle East Report.)

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