Prisoners of distress: sick and hunger strikers

pens and opinions

By: Jawad Boulos

On the nineteenth of last month, the prisoner, Nasser Abu Hamid, underwent a complex surgery in the Israeli “Barzilai” Hospital, during which doctors removed a tumor from his lungs, which they had discovered after medical examinations they conducted on him last August. For those who do not know the story of this The family, here is its bitter juice; The prisoner Nasser Abu Hamid is a resident of Al-Amari camp, which, like a Gazan in the middle of history, is in the middle of the cities of Al-Bireh and Ramallah. 2002 on security charges, and then their brother, Islam, was convicted in 2018, likewise with a life sentence. It is also mentioned that they have a sixth brother, Abdel Moneim Abu Hamid, who was martyred years ago. The rest of the family was not spared the arrests and abuse of the Israeli occupation, in particular, as manifested in the deprivation of their virtuous mother “Umm Youssef” from visiting them in prisons for many years, knowing that they had lost their father who died while in captivity. Abu Hamid, upon hearing the news of her son’s illness, said, “Nasir’s spirits are strong and high, despite his cancer, and he will conquer the disease as he conquered the occupation.” And she added, in one of her press interviews, and on his tongue: "I am free, despite the handcuffs on my wrist. I live dear, I do not humiliate a criminal." Thus, from her name once, “Warda Min Al-Amari” summed up the story of hundreds of sick Palestinian prisoners; And if she says, then the words are as the Al-Amariya said. For every Palestinian captive and prisoner there is a story that is echoed by the breath of the night, echoes of permanent pain, and an effect that must be seen and lasted. The cases of sick prisoners remain the most difficult and provocative for me. Some of these cases make me feel how the jailer, the son of Adam, loses his humanity and turns into a mere monster, all of it from evil, and the prisoner remains, in return for it, frying, happily, like a mass of hot tin. It is the right of all those prisoners that we have to tell their stories to the world, and document how they suffered And any medical neglect practiced against them, until some of them surrendered their lives inside Israeli prisons, after they had sacrificed their freedoms for the sake of a desired homeland and the dignity of a people. I knew that my day would be difficult; First, I will visit the prisoner Nasser Abu Hamid in Ashkelon prison, and then I will go to the Ramleh prison clinic, where I will meet some administrative prisoners who have been on hunger strike for many days. From a distance, the buildings looked beautiful with touches of modern architecture, but they were not, in fact, this is what was achieved when I approached them, except for blocks of “Kitchi” buildings, cheap, which had been built by the right-wing Israeli governments to block the hunger of the popular and demagogic classes rising on the thresholds of right-wing palaces fascist. On my right was the sea, which was the most beautiful thing you could see there, and the sand, which was everywhere, was blurring the memory and bringing back to it pictures of the departing caravans, and the shoes of lost and lost. The prison of Ashkelon had not changed since I visited it the last time; Prisons in Israel, no matter how hard those in charge try to modernize and restore them, remain flimsy evidence of attempts to kill lives and barren strongholds to breed hatred and fertilize hatred. The room was not what you might imagine; It's a place that might remind you of Picasso's cubist paintings; It is neither rectangular, nor square, nor shaped like a trapezoid; It was, or so it felt, like an abandoned building like the one we sometimes watched in American cowboy movies. Dust was scattered all over her sides, and to my left, where I was sitting on a bare concrete bench, I noticed what looked like a door. It was an unpainted wooden board whose surface suffered from several fractures, and behind it I noticed what was supposed to be a bathroom, but with time and due to neglect, it turned into a sanitary object, with no water or air. I tried to kill the waiting time, so I called out what she said. I had “Um Yusuf” one day when I called to ask how she was. Her voice, which I had conjured up in my mind, like the sound of roses in the cracks of the camp's rock, beat with calm force and charged me with confidence and firmness. The rattling of the handcuffs close to me cut my line of thought. The jailer opened a heavy iron door, and Nasser Abu Hamid entered through it, who, having removed his handcuffs, sat behind the glass, which did not preserve its original transparent white color. I greeted him through the telephone, and he replied in a tired voice, punctuated by fits of light coughing. I tried not to be alarmed by what I saw; His face was pale yellow with a light green like a laurel leaf, and his eyes were sunken, with clear fading, under a brow revealing what Nasir had tried to hide from me. I greeted him with family and friends and asked him how he was. He informed me that he was transferred to Barzilai Hospital on 9/29, that is, about twenty days before my visit to him. He told me that the doctors had written to him a detailed report on his condition and at the end of it requested that he be taken back to Barzilai Hospital after several days in order to perform a necessary surgery. The medical report was in his possession, so he put it on the glass in front of me, and we read it together. It was clear he needed to operate immediately; The procrastination of the Prisons Authority was a reason for the aggravation of his health, because, as he assured me, if they had done their duty immediately when he felt from the beginning and when signs of illness appeared on him, his condition would not have deteriorated and his condition would not have reached what it is these days. He told me that the prison administration promised Transferring him, early last week, to Barzilai Hospital to undergo the operation there; Then he added: If they do not fulfill their promise, all prisoners of the prison will take unprecedented escalatory steps, in addition to the necessity of moving the legal path, despite our lack of confidence in it. He was friendly, smiling and calm, and carried me peace for his loved ones and a weight of his apparent determination. He stood embracing with great concern and hope, and his palm was lying on the glass, embracing my palm; Before leaving, he said: The policy of medical neglect against Palestinian prisoners cannot yet be tolerated. Some of them have left silently and with grief, and the rest are projects of martyrdom. A jailer came and took him out through the iron door and disappeared. As for me, I kept waiting for someone to get me out of this wilderness and my anxiety. Umm Nasser’s voice came back to me, and I heard her say to me: “The important thing, sir, is that you do not show your weakness, and that you do not let your eyes shed tears in front of them; We will remain strong if we smile in their faces even as they demolish our homes and kill our children; We will defeat their tyranny with our steadfastness and our sacrifices, because they are the weak, for the people of truth are stronger than tyrants, and my children and everything I own is a sacrifice for dignity and Palestine.” I stood there smiling, and after a few minutes, a jailer the color of coffee passed in front of me, and she asked me who I am and why I am standing there? I answered it while smiling. With a shy African immigrant laughing, she agreed to take me to the entrance to the prison, which was only a few meters away from us. entered the waiting room; I tried to smile, and Nasser's tired face was in front of me, and the smile was helpless. I knew what awaited me: three guardians of destiny starved of resisting the tyranny of the jailer, and were waiting for me to find together a path to salvation and a way out towards freedom and dignity.

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