865: The Other Territory

24:46The first settlers near Tuba set up shop in 1981. Today, about 550 people live there. The settlement's called Ma 'on. They have schools, a library, youth club. Twenty years later, an outpost, Chavat Ma 'on, was established nearby. It's illegal under Israeli law. And nearly 20 years after that, Chavat Ma 'on sprung its own illegal outpost, called Man Farm, after the local settler leader who started it, Isashar Man. This newer outpost is a sheep farm, and a sort of Airbnb-type setup with a campsite as well. It has 106 Google reviews, with an average of 4.9 stars. Ali has known Isas Harman since he was a kid.

25:29He remembers him harassing them on their way to school. And nowadays, he sees them around too, but he says, at least once a week. We reached out to Isas Harman for comment, but did not hear back. His wife told us he had no interest in speaking.

25:46would mainly mess with the Palestinians when they got close to the settlements. Since October 7th, the settlers are closing in on the residents of Tuba, and even entering the village. Ali told me and my producer Dana about a day last summer. It was around 8, half past 8 in the morning or 9. My uncle was grazing like 300 sheep under his house, like where we are sitting, 200 meters under us. This valley right below us? Just below? The bottom of this valley just below us. And suddenly he saw like four masked settlers. Four settlers wearing masks. In the middle of his flock. Two started like to run towards him, to scare him.

26:30And in the same time, two start to take the sheep to the settlement. How many did they get? They took everything. All the sheep? All the sheep. They start to run with the sheep. and his wife and himself were screaming at me like the settlers took everything we have and come help us. So Ali comes running and starts recording on his phone. Halfway up a big hill, he finds them. At the start of the video, you see two men. They're young, wearing masks. They both have large sticks in their hands. One has a rock as well. They're threatening his aunt. Ali's pleading with them in Hebrew. Stop, stop, put down the rock.

27:13The men yell at Ali to go home. When he starts running back, they chase him. But then, something surprising happens. While they were attacking us, for a couple of minutes, our sheep ran back to our house. Like, to the direction of our house, out of their hands, out of their control. Ali is proud when he tells this story, because it was a rare victory. 300 sheep saved. Sheep theft has become an increasingly common phenomenon in the West Bank. A lot of times, people don't get them back, which means losing their entire livelihood. Ali says 300 sheep are worth roughly$125 ,000. I've seen even higher estimates.

28:04Ali doesn't really sleep at night anymore, thanks to the constant threats from settlers and his own hypervigilance. So he stays up most of the night and keeps watch over the village. He started doing this a few months before October 7th. But after, he got even more anxious. The government handed out weapons in settlements, at least 3 ,000 of them, in the first two weeks of the war. They also gave ATVs to settlers near Tuba. And a lot more settlers began walking around in military uniforms. I called Ali while he was up one night. He was in his room, sitting on his couch, getting up to go to the door every few minutes, where he had a good view of the family compound.

28:45He was drinking tea and smoking. How many cigarettes do you usually go through? In the night? Yeah. Yeah, between 7 to 10. You don't smoke, right? I stopped. I quit. Great. Yes. When I was a little older than you, I quit. So you have some time. But you should quit. Sometimes it's quiet. Nothing happens. Other nights it's not. Just right now while I'm talking with you, I hear outside of my home that a settler on ATP just passed through our villages. Wow. So there are settlers there now? Yes. Like outside of my door, there is a settler right now. No reason for the settlers to pass through Tuba. They have much better roads on the other side of their outposts.

29:36Sometimes Ali shines a big flashlight at them as they drive by, so they know he's there keeping an eye out.

29:47After a few months of taking the kids to school, Ali found a different arrangement for them, and then spent a lot of his time driving people to the police station to file complaints after altercations with settlers. But Ali doesn't have much hope that the police will help them. In the last two decades, 94 % of settler violence investigations ended without charges, according to human rights organization Yesh Deen. Still, Ali goes to the police because he wants to have a record of everything, in case they end up in court in the future.

30:22Things got so bad in the West Bank after October 7th, that in 2024, for the first time, the United States imposed sanctions on individuals and entities there. Isas Rauman, the settler leader who started the nearby shepherding outposts, caught the attention of the Biden administration. They placed sanctions on him and on his outposts. Sanctions can make it really hard to use credit cards or banks. But in January, Donald Trump took office. And the same day, he decided to call off all sanctions on West Bank settlements and individuals. We don't know if that's why, but after that, settler violence intensified in Masafariata, where Tuba is.

31:01And my next call with Ali, less than a week later, was different than all the others. Hello, hello. Hi. Can you hear me? Can you hear me well? I'd seen online that something big had happened in his village. So I was sitting in the car and I was drinking tea and I was waiting for a call. Then suddenly I saw them, six masked settlers running toward me. I saw them running from above the hill down, like, you know, like that you feel that it's like a storm. Like what I remember is like a sandstorm or whatever coming very fast towards us. Ali gets out of his car. The parking area is in the middle of the compound.

31:52His family was all around, his uncle, his grandma, his little cousins. He started screaming, telling them to run away. He was afraid the masked men were going to hurt them. But he had another fear. The car. They're going to destroy the duster. So, after warning everyone, he went back to the car. But when he got back to the car, he saw the attackers were already there. One, he said, had an M16, and the other, a bottle of gasoline. He gave up, ran in the other direction to join his family, and started filming.

32:33In the video, the sheep are running. Someone is throwing rocks in the direction of the attackers. We see smoke, flames, things break. Ali realizes his little cousins, Shuri and Jude, ages seven and nine, are still in the house next to the fire. He yells at them to come out. He yells at his family and neighbors to get away from the attackers.

33:07The attackers, apparently done with what they wanted to do, run off. Just five minutes have passed. Ali goes back to the parking area, and we finally see the car in the video. Huge flames fill the interior and pour out of all the windows. Ali and I talked on Zoom two days after that happened. I mean, luckily, I'm still alive, not being burned inside the car, so that's still a huge miracle and something to be thankful about. How are your cousins doing now after this attack? Still very traumatized. Ali said that the attackers went into the house where the kids were. They didn't have time to escape.

34:01The attackers hit Julie with a rock on her back and Jude with a stick on his elbow. Either they are not cheering, but I was, when I was in their age, I was not saying anything to anybody, but I remember how much I am scared. You know, like when I was six, I used to go to school, entering inside Khafat Mahon and facing the most brutal attacks on my way to school and I wanted to convince my parents not to go to school. Yeah. Because of how much I was scared. So for sure this is what the children are feeling. Why didn't you say anything when you were a kid? I don't know. Like, yeah. You know, what would be like the results of sharing.

35:03That's what I remember, that even if I share, there is nobody that is actually able to end this reality. The second photo in Ali's room, it's the image of the car burning. The top part of the car is all fire, the bottom is charred, Smoke billows off to the very blue sky. The car was so important to Ali, to Tuba, that I was sure he would already have a plan to replace it. But he was paralyzed. The ability of getting another vehicle is not the most difficult part. The most difficult part is what will be the fate of a new car. Yeah. this is the this is the most devastating part this is like the part that like saying to me don't get another car because if they burn this one they might burn the other one so if they can do that at 2pm like not at midnight or not at 2am if they can do it at 2pm then And this is a very scary situation.

36:26The police came to Tuba the same day to investigate. They sent a specialist to try to collect evidence. They took some rocks, looked for fingerprints in the car. But Ali says they didn't find anything. Two teenagers from Chavat Mohn were arrested, but they were released less than a week later. Ali heard the case had been closed. So many cars have been set on fire in recent years in the West Bank that a big Palestinian insurance company has started to offer settler attack insurance. They put out an ad with a picture of a car burning intensely.

37:04After the Zoom call, I didn't hear from Ali. For weeks. He stopped answering my texts. He was silent on social media. Finally, he resurfaced. Sorry for my silence, he texted. I hope you're all right. Turned out, a few days after our call, he had been arrested. He was released the same day, never charged, but the police kept his phone. I reached out to the police about this and about the car attack and never heard back. Ali felt like so much had been taken away from him. His car, his documents, which he kept in his car, his phone. Everything was gone in just five days. Like, everything, everything.

37:47He got depressed and did something that no one here remembers him doing before. He took off, left Tuba for about a week, and went to stay with a friend. His aunt, Aisha, told us that he never leaves. He's always there, ready to protect them. But Ali was the most scared he's ever been. He needed a beat to be alone, to recover. Life in Tuba was always a struggle, with the settlers around. But Ali says that since October 7th, it feels like they're pushing towards a specific goal. They are working to kick the Palestinians out of their homes. This is what their message is, like, leave from here. The government, the Israeli occupation government, is preventing us from building houses, from building schools, from building any kind of medical or educational units, building roads.

38:41they are preventing us from surviving and we survive with whatever we can. The settlers would say, if this is not enough to make you leave this land, we will do it with shooting, with like making your life hell. And what's your message back? I was trying to push me out of here. I didn't even decide to fuck live here. I wouldn't even choose to come to Masafariata. between, I don't know, Valdanio or Vicenza or Padova. These are names of Italian towns. Ali loves Italy, but he's from Tuba. His family has lived there for generations. It's my home. I was born here. Are you blaming me for something I ended up in?

39:29In June, settlers injured more Palestinians in the West Bank than they have in any other month over the past two decades, according to the UN. About a month ago, a friend of Ali's was shot and killed by a settler in a neighboring village. Ali's friend was filming a clash between the settler and some Palestinian residents, so it's all on video. The shooter claimed self-defense. He was arrested, but was released after a few days. At least 11 Palestinians were also arrested, including Ali, who wasn't even there.

40:09Back when I visited Ali in April, he told me he'd made a decision about the car. He was going to fix the duster, which seemed impossible to me. But then, in June, I called him.

40:25Hello, hello. Hi, Ali. Hi, Ael. How are you? I'm good. Now the car is fixed and it's already packed in tuba. Wow. He sent the photo. The Dachydaster was back.

40:52Yael Evanor. Coming up, an Israeli doctor tries to make sense of a case that does not make sense. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. Support for This American Life comes from Mattress Firm. Restless partner keeping you up? Those constant movements can make it hard to get the rest you need. Mattress Firm's sleep experts will match you with a bed for deeper rest, like a Tempur-Pedic. Its unique temper material absorbs motion for undisturbed rest. Shop Mattress Firm's Black Friday sale and save up to$500 on select Tempur-Pedic adjustable mattress sets with next-day delivery.

41:31Restrictions apply. See mattressfirm.com or a store for details. Support for This American Life comes from BetterHelp. Most FSA dollars expire at the end of the year, so it's time to use them or lose them. With BetterHelp, you can invest those funds in taking care of your mind with online therapy. Join today and you can be matched with a licensed therapist in as little as 24 hours. Visit betterhelp.com slash T-A-L to get 10 % off your first month. Support for This American Life comes from Mint Mobile. At Mint Mobile, their favorite word is no. No contracts, no monthly bills, no hidden fees. Plans start at$15 a month.

42:13Make the switch at mintmobile.com slash American. That's mintmobile.com slash American. Upfront payment of$45 required, equivalent to$15 a month. Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. It's just American Life, Amara Glass. Today's show, The Other Territory. We're looking at what's been happening in the West Bank while the world's attention has been on Gaza. And before we turn to Act 2, there are two quick snapshots that I want to share with you of life in the West Bank since October 7th.

42:53Here's the first. It's a hall in a municipal park. a place where normally you would have a wedding or some other celebration, where 16 families are living. Matt's on the floor where they sleep.

43:10This room that you see here, this single room, 40 people sleep in it. There are no secrets. We change in front of each other. We sleep facing each other. There are no beds. That's Nawal Mohamed Mahmoud Heikal, 31, a single mother with two daughters. She spoke with journalist Ahmed El-Baz. The wall is here because of something new that the Israeli army started doing in the West Bank in January. The country's defense minister announced that month that the military was going to start using the tactics that they'd been using in Gaza to level houses in neighborhoods. But now they were going to do that in the West Bank.

43:46So Operation Iron Wall attacked four Palestinian refugee camps, that are basically cities, with tanks and airstrikes and bulldozers tearing up the roads and knocking down buildings, displacing at least 30 ,000 people, according to the United Nations. It's unclear when or if they'll ever be able to move back. When Wall talked to Ahmed, the Israeli military just published a map indicating what houses they were going to demolish next. Yeah, I saw it. That's my parents' home. They're threatening my parents' home with demolition.

44:22Yes, they have a circle around it. On my parents' home, they have two dots on it. They're threatening demolition. I live in my parents' home in a room. For us, the camp is our entire life.

44:40Okay, here's a second snapshot. This one? A bright, shiny car dealership. Chaka block, shiny new cars. So I'm looking around the showroom, two-floor showroom, and I don't see any customers. We have one. Wait, who's the customer? Downstairs. That man. Abusleman. Abusleman. He's the customer, yes. Abdallah Al-Nacha is the showroom manager for Al-Salam Motors in the city of Hebron. This is a family business with a car lot, car repair, gas station, and a curveball here, French trifactory. And this is something I didn't really understand before I visited the West Bank, is just what a disaster its economy is right now.

45:23For a bunch of reasons. But one of the big ones is that roughly 120 ,000 Palestinians used to commute from the West Bank into Israel. And after October 7th, the Israeli government forbade most of them from doing that, saying it was for security reasons, even though Israel's own security services, Shin Bet, said the risk could be managed. Shin Bet, in fact, said it would be riskier to leave so many people unemployed and discontent. But those tens of thousands of commuters were not just a backbone of the Palestinian economy. They were Abdullah's customers. They buy cars, new cars, or they buy lands, or they buy many things.

46:00and since the 7th of October, they're all unemployed. People can't make their car payments. The dealership's been repossessing vehicles. They've gone from selling 560 cars a year to 175. They've let a third of their employees go in all their businesses. This bit also surprised me. Post-October 7th, they say Israeli companies decided to stop selling them potatoes for the french fry factory. Abdullah Azzah says that the local Palestinian government in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority, owes them$6 million for construction and agricultural equipment that it bought. How soon do you think you'll get paid?

46:44They send, like, each month, around$20 ,000 each month. Yes. That just barely covers the interest. It doesn't cover the interest. Why can't they pay? They can't pay because they don't have money. Palestinian Authority doesn't have money, in part because the Israeli government has withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues from it. A World Bank report in June described its finances as a fiscal crisis. But because they are the only local buyers for this kind of year, Abdullah continues to sell to them. They still buy equipment now, yes. And so how much does that thing cost? Each equipment around$140 ,000.

47:27And how much do they put down? How much do they pay when they buy? 30 %? No, nothing. Zero. What? Zero. How do I get that deal? You have to be a Palestinian authority or one of them. Yes. This is the kind of family business where once a week they play volleyball together. It's brothers and cousins and Abdullah's uncle managing this business. And when I asked Abdullah's cousin, Wajdi, how this has affected him personally, how hard it's been keeping the business going. He said that for the first time in his life, he's thought about moving away for a little bit. Until this war finished, to go abroad.

48:09Have you told your brother you've had these thoughts? Yes. What's he say? Shut up. Think about your business here and my family as well. Every person I talk to in the West Bank seems stressed out about money. People with jobs are supporting people who lost jobs. Meanwhile, prices for food and gas are rising. The only business I ran across that seemed to be doing okay is this guy, Bilal.

48:37He sells this incredible corn that is covered in brightly colored powders and sauces, including this TikTok-ready fluorescent teal sauce from a stand on the street.

48:52He's saying that ever since October 7th, people are just sitting around, without work, not doing anything. And they wander around the streets, and corn, they can afford. His business has improved.

49:14Act two, what happened to Walid? Since October 7th, there have been a ton of arrests in the West Bank, doubling the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Now it's over 10 ,000 people, according to the Israeli government. They're held as security prisoners, not on normal criminal charges. Most are from the West Bank. Over 3 ,600 are in something called administrative detention, where they're not charged with anything and there's no trial. They're just held based on classified evidence they don't see and can't contest. Israeli prisons were notoriously overcrowded even before October 7th. But in general, not many Palestinians died in Israeli prisons.

49:54In the year before October 7th, it was two Palestinians, according to Physicians for Human Rights, Israel. Since October 7th, they count at least 93 Palestinians who died in Israeli custody. Najee Abbas works for Physicians for Human Rights and says after October 7th... It started to be weird because every week, every two weeks, you are getting a call saying there is a new death. So what is happening in these prisons? Well, in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel, Israel's minister of national security, a far-right politician named Itamar Ben-Gavir, enacted some changes to the prison system.

50:33Ben-Gavir is a longtime provocateur and ultra-nationalist, somebody who's been convicted of supporting a Jewish terrorist organization. and incitement to racism. After the Hamas attacks, Ben-Gavir drastically limited security prisoners' contact with the outside world. It didn't matter whether they were accused of any connection to the Hamas attacks or Hamas itself. Families can't visit anymore. They can't call. The Red Cross, which had monitored conditions inside Israeli prisons since 1967, is now barred. In public statements, Ben-Gavir refers to all Palestinian security prisoners as terrorists.

51:09The physical conditions inside prisons have gotten a lot worse, too. Scabies infestations are rampant, and I've been for over a year. I didn't know this. Scabies is a contagious skin disease caused by mites. Prisoners tell their lawyers that a dozen people are sometimes crammed into a cell meant for five or six. And Benkavir reduced prisoners' food rations to the minimum allowable by Israeli law. Closed the canteens where prisoners could buy their own food. Ben-Gavir didn't try to hide any of this. Last July, he posted on X, quote, Since I assumed the position of minister of national security, one of the highest goals I have set for myself is to worsen the conditions of the terrorists in the prisons and to reduce their rights to the minimum required by law.

51:53He told the Associated Press that the purpose of these changes was to deter terrorism. Again, here's Najee Abbas of Physicians for Human Rights. By the Israeli law, the punishment for an offense or a crime or when you are charged with something, the punishment is limiting your freedom, taking your freedom of movement. That is the punishment. But Benghviar, he was very clear from day one in the office that he think that the conditions of the detention, not the detention itself, the conditions of the detention should be part of the punishment. Palestinian prisoners began dying, many of them not very old, in their 40s, 30s, 20s.

52:42We don't know what happened to most of them. There have been a few autopsies that Physicians for Human Rights knows about, but even the families of the prisoners who get autopsies almost never get an autopsy report. Here's what they get instead. They're allowed to send a doctor to observe the post-mortem examination on their behalf. This doctor doesn't actually participate in the autopsy. They just watch the procedure, then afterwards write up an account, just a page or two, about what they saw. And since October 7th, their observations, these written reports, have become one of the only windows into what is happening to security prisoners inside Israeli prisons today.

53:21Dan Chivas has the story of one of those accounts. The place where these autopsies are performed is called Abu Kabir. It's in Tel Aviv. It's the Israeli government's forensic medicine institute. Since October 7th, courts have dictated that only Israeli doctors can attend autopsies on behalf of the families. So Physicians for Human Rights went in search of Israeli doctors who'd be willing to go on behalf of Palestinian families. One of the people they called was Dr. Daniel Solomon, an Israeli physician born in Italy. He's on the board of Physicians for Human Rights, volunteers with their mobile medical clinic in the West Bank.

53:58Do-gooder kind of guy. Daniel had never been to an autopsy before. He's a surgeon, not a forensic pathologist. Those are the doctors specially trained to do autopsies. But Daniel said sure, he'd go. He didn't have much time to prepare. I looked a bit online on how an autopsy is performed and how maybe a report can look like. And that was it. Daniel had also never been inside Abu Kabir, the forensic institute, though he jogged by it a bunch. The first time Daniel went, it was only three weeks after the Hamas attacks on October 7th. The staff at Abu Kabir was still processing the remains of Israelis who had been killed.

54:38In a different room, down the hall, Daniel observed the autopsies of two Palestinian prisoners that day. Over the course of the next year, he went to five of these autopsies. All Palestinian men from the West Bank who had died in Israeli prisons. After each one, Daniel wrote up his observations. One had, quote, multiple signs of physical assault and injury. Another had a relatively recent head trauma. Daniel saw conditions he assessed as treatable. One man's lungs were in the worst shape Daniel had ever seen. One of the lungs was surrounded by pus and completely collapsed. He was 23. Daniel's view was that based on the condition of the lungs, the man would have been coughing violently and noticeably for at least a week.

55:24Daniel's used to seeing bodies, inside and out. He's a surgeon. Standing there observing during the autopsies, taking notes, he kept a practiced emotional distance from the body, same as he does when he's in surgery. And then, this March, there was Walid Ahmed, 17 years old. Daniel had read about Walid's death in the news. It made international headlines. The first Palestinian teenager to die inside an Israeli prison since Israel took over the West Bank in 1967, according to Physicians for Human Rights. Walid was from the West Bank, a town called Silwad. Palestinian officials told reporters he had fallen and hit his head, citing other prisoners' accounts.

56:07When Daniel got to Abu Kabir for Walid's autopsy, the staff there did something they'd never done on any of his previous visits. They warned him about what he was about to see. They were telling me, like, they were commenting before he came in to kind of like get ready. He doesn't look good. The moment they placed his body on the autopsy table, I understood that I was dealing with something and that I was not actually prepared to witness. The way he looked, it's hard to describe. It was difficult for me to even call it malnutrition. This is how starvation looks like. I think the only thing that comes close to that, in my opinion, is really those pictures of the Holocaust.

56:58That's how bad it was. And I deal with cancer patients. I deal, like, I've seen anorexia. I've seen people get as thin as it gets. I honestly have never seen someone looking like he did. This interview was several months ago, before photos of starvation in Gaza were widespread. In the news stories about Walid, there was a photo of him from right before he was arrested. Walid looks like a strapping teenage boy, dirty blonde hair, the beginnings of a beard. He's fit, a soccer star, hoping to join the Palestinian national team. Nothing at all like the body Daniel was seeing on the metal table in front of him.

57:40It's just like two absolutely different persons. I mean, it was really beyond recognition.

57:53Again, Daniel's account is not an official autopsy report. He doesn't have access to additional information. For instance, tests done on Walid's body after the autopsy. He doesn't know for sure how Walid got to look the way he did at the end. But his assessment is that however it happened... His starvation, at the end of the day, killed him because he exposed him so much to other diseases that might have been treatable and that, in his case, just become fatal.

58:30Daniel addressed his account of the autopsy, quote, To the family of Walid Ahmed, Walid was a case where, in Daniel's view, everything he was seeing could have been treated. His significant weight loss, also scabies. Daniel's account also said Walid had an inflammation of the colon. He did not see any evidence of a head injury, external or internal. Walid's body had been sent to Abu Kabir with notes from the prison medical clinic. Daniel read them and wrote in his account that in December, Walid had gone to the prison medical clinic and, quote, mentioned that he did not have access to sufficient amounts of food.

59:08Daniel said that, according to the prison notes, Walid had said other prisoners were taking his food. The month before Walid died, he went to the clinic two more times. Israeli law says that, quote, A prisoner shall be entitled to the medical care necessary to maintain his health and to appropriate monitoring conditions as stipulated by an IPS physician. IPS is Israel Prison Service. The relevant thing is that he was someone who was under the responsibility of the Israeli prison service. He was under a system that failed him so badly. The Israel Prison Service told me it doesn't comment on individual cases.

59:49But they sent a statement saying, in part, quote, All inmates are held according to legal procedures and their basic rights, including access to medical care, are upheld by professionally trained staff, subject to internal and external review.

1:00:07It took Daniel a couple of days to write his account. Just because I wanted it to be accurate, and sometimes it's really not that easy to find the wording, like somewhere in between something that a physician can understand, but something that also the family can understand. Daniel's account, with his observations, went to Walid's father, Khaled. Until he got it, he didn't know anything about how his son died or why. He says he just got a call one night, close to midnight, telling him Walid was dead. Khaled is the only one in the family who read all of Daniel's report. He said Walid's mother, siblings, and aunts couldn't bear to finish it.

1:00:52Before receiving the report, knowing that Walid was in good health, my first thought was it was a result of torture. or beating.

1:01:04I sought help from a doctor here in town, and he explained to me the entire report, like for medical terms. He explained all the details and all the different small parts in it. That was, it just,

1:01:24it just made it more shocking. Shocking. I mean, my son, Waleed, was an athletic young man. I don't know what they did to him in prison.

1:01:43Waleed, Khaled said, had cared how he looked. Showered twice a day. In photos, he's always dressed nicely, usually in name brands. Hill figure, polo.

1:01:58Walid liked things that were for clothes. He liked the nicest things. He wanted the nicest, best things. He did not use to ask, of course, but I knew what he liked. When you would go out to buy clothes, I knew his taste. He liked everything to be neat. Walid was planning to go to university next year to study finance and banking, Khaled told me. Some nights after school and over the summer break, he worked at Khalid's shop. Khalid's mother was Brazilian. He imports nuts and coffee from Brazil and elsewhere. Walid was a senior in high school. From what I can see, his social media is filled with photos of him and his friends, often preening, often in front of cars, mixed in with memorial posts for young men who have died, and support for others who are in prison.

1:02:50In a couple photos, people are holding guns. From the outside, it's hard to tell what any of that adds up to. But I showed all this to a Palestinian journalist who said he's seen hundreds of accounts like this.

1:03:10Walid had never been arrested before, his lawyers say. The military came in the middle of the night, last September, 2024. Middle-of-the-night raids are the standard way the military arrests Palestinians in the West Bank, including minors. That was true even before October 7th. But there have been so many more arrests since then. Khaled says everyone was asleep when they came, him and his wife, all four kids. At 17, Walid was the oldest. Khaled estimates there were 25 soldiers. He says some of them broke two doors, came into the house, and smashed the windows of the front room, flipped over couches, tore curtains.

1:03:53As soon as they entered, they started saying to me, you're Hamas, you're Hezbollah. I told them I am neither Hamas nor Hezbollah. They went into the kids' room and terrified them. I told the soldiers, wait, wait, just let me. So then I went and gathered all the children and put them here in this spot. Khaled says Walid had on only his underwear and a tank top when they took him away. When they were arresting Walid, I said to the officer, let us just put pants on him because that night it was a bit cold. I said, let us put pants and a jacket on him. But the officer refused. When I asked the Israeli military about Khaled's account of the arrest, they told me that no one filed a report complaining about how it was handled.

1:04:41Two weeks after Walid was arrested, five months before his death, he was charged with producing an explosive or incendiary device, which is identified as a Molotov cocktail, throwing an explosive device, and arson. The charging document is remarkably vague. There are no specific locations saying where the crimes allegedly happened, or specific times. One incident supposedly took place, quote, sometime during the year 2022. One of Walid's lawyers pointed out that there's no complainant listed on the charging document. Nobody who went to the authorities and said, This kid threw a Molotov cocktail at my house and caused damage to me.

1:05:20If there were, he said, there would have been more specificity to the charges. The evidence against him seemed to be allegations from two other prisoners. Walid was being tried under Israeli military law, where the standards of evidence are lower than in civilian court. All Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to military law. That's been true for almost 60 years. In response to my questions about Walid's case, the Israeli military sent a statement that said, in part, that Walid was, quote,

1:05:57It's not clear if Walid did any of the things he was charged with. His lawyer said he denied it, and Walid died before he could give his defense or take a plea.

1:06:13Khaled spent six months trying to find out what was happening to his son in prison. He learned pretty quickly that Walid was in Megiddo prison, hours away, outside the West Bank, in Israel. No one in the family was allowed to communicate with him. They couldn't visit him. Throughout last fall and winter, Khalid went to Walid's court hearings in a military courtroom in the West Bank. The prosecutors and judges were all in the Israeli military. Walid appeared remotely over a video connection from prison. Khalid saw Walid for the last time like this, on a TV screen during a court hearing in February.

1:06:49Could you tell how he looked physically?

1:06:55I saw his face. Of course, we could only see him from here and up. His face was thinner. But the day I saw him, he smiled to my face, and I smiled back. Khaled says he saw him for only about 20 seconds. Waleed died six weeks later, on March 22nd. The family was informed two days after.

1:07:26What physicians for human rights and others were learning around the time Walid died sheds light on how Walid might have become so frail in the weeks between when his father last saw him on screen and his death. They learned that some sort of gastrointestinal illness was going around the prison. Lawyers for Palestinians in Israeli prisons reported seeing their clients deteriorate from one visit to the next, getting very thin. Prisoners, including minors, told their lawyers they were vomiting, had diarrhea, were sometimes fainting, and were rapidly losing weight. Khaled, Walid's father, had heard about it from a friend of Walid's, who'd been in the same prison and was released.

1:08:06We heard about it from another teenager, who was also held at Megiddo prison at the same time as Walid, and knew Walid. He's 16 years old, and he first spoke to reporter Hagar Shezaf at the Israeli newspaper Ha 'aretz. In the Haaretz story, he's called Ibrahim. It's not his real name. I'm going to use that name for him too. Ibrahim's experience in prison mirrored Walid's in several important ways, and he was an eyewitness to Walid's last days. He talked to my producer in the West Bank. Ibrahim and Walid were arrested around the same time. He said Walid joked around a lot. He was a talker.

1:08:48Yes, I talk to him a lot. Almost every day I talk to him. When he used to live with me in the same cell, I used to talk to him. We used to talk about food because we were starving.

1:09:00He would say to me, when we get out, God willing, we will go to my father's store. We will eat cashews and nuts. Ibrahim said they never got enough food. He said everyone was hungry, and everyone stole food from each other. After the first two months, they weren't in the same cell anymore. And then around the beginning of March, Ibrahim got sick. He was dropping weight, vomiting, diarrhea. He said when he saw Walid, he noticed Walid had similar symptoms. Ibrahim was so sick, he said, he couldn't make it to the toilet in time. He said his sheets were filthy. He couldn't wash his clothes. He smelled.

1:09:40Made him feel like a little child. Ibrahim told Haaretz that when he asked for medical help, he was given an over-the-counter drug similar to Tylenol and was told to eat rice and drink water. He said five of his nine cellmates had the same symptoms. Ibrahim said Walid deteriorated visibly. He said he saw Walid the morning he died.

1:10:07Okay, so we were out for the break. Everybody ran towards the bathrooms. His body was weak. I mean, he couldn't walk a lot. He couldn't run. Neither could I. He opened the cell door. We came out towards the bathrooms. Suddenly, he fell on the floor and started bleeding from his mouth.

1:10:31They told us to go back to the cells. We thought it was going to be a crackdown and beating. But when we went back into the cells, Walid was bleeding out of his mouth. They put him on the gurney and took him.

1:10:48After Walid died, Ibrahim said the prison made a few changes. They separated out the thinnest prisoners and gave them more food, brought in a washing machine. In May, six weeks after Walid died, Ibrahim was released from prison 11 days early. Ibrahim says he weighed 159 pounds when he entered prison. When he left, he was only 101 pounds, according to the parole board. The parole board noted he was, quote, difficult to look at and a cause of great concern.

1:11:25This is for Waleed. And this is for Waleed. When I visited Khaled in April at the family's home, it's pretty, stone, lots of tall windows. He showed me Waleed's trophies and ribbons on a display shelf in their sitting room. They were for soccer, Waleed was a goalie, and also for kickboxing. This also was for Walid. And also a competition known as the Math Olympics. I put him in private school since he was bright and driven. He was well known for his intelligence and his excellence in math. The kid in Khalid's head was Walid suspended in amber. Walid from before he was arrested. This energetic teenager barreling towards adulthood.

1:12:17He had big ideas for the family business. He wanted to expand, open more stores, learn different roasting and grinding methods, get into cappuccino and espresso. He wanted the company to be a brand name. Khaled had been planning to take Walid on a trip to Brazil this summer. Walid had never been. He had just signed Walid up for driving lessons when he was arrested. They were a close family. We have a table here in the house, in the middle, and we would spend so much time chasing each other around the table. I would come from here, he would go from there. I would go from there, he would come from here.

1:12:58I would climb the table to get to him, but because he was in good shape, he would get away. His mom would feel bad for him and tell me, poor him, you keep chasing after him. I tell her, he is the one chasing me.

1:13:17The reason Khaled agreed to an autopsy in the first place is that his lawyer told him it could help him get Walid's body back. It's the practice of the Israeli government to hold onto bodies of Palestinian prisoners to keep them as bargaining chips. Hamas does it too, with Israeli bodies. Since October 7th, Israel hasn't released the bodies of any Palestinian prisoners, including Walid's. So Khalid is still waiting. He still hasn't buried his son.

1:13:56Dana Chivas

1:14:23¶¶ I'll go right through.

1:14:57Dureman, our executive editors, Emmanuel Barry. Other people who worked on the show as reporters and producers, Ahmed Elbaz, Jude Taha, Salson Khalifeh, and Hany Hawassly, editors Sarah Yassin, translators Shani Aviram, Talia Krebsky, Bashar Ahalabi, and Dana Balut, also voice actor Waleed Zuitar. Special thanks today to Henriette Shakar, Noah Cohen, Matt Duss, Oriel Eisner, Daniel Estrin, Cara Lee Francis, Neda Freja, Olit Givati, Rami Ghali, Humel Gatatfi, Harlow Holmes, Matthew Hooper, the team at Hotspot Cover, Aida Kaden, Ariel Kahana, Jessica Montel and Danny Shenhar at Hamoked, Reham Nasra, Raviv Rose, Noah Zitat, Gabriel Shander, Stefan Schmidt, Guy Shalev, Ofer Shelach, Yudah Shaul, Agar Shazaf, and Seth Freed-Wessler.

1:15:45Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia. He was like, yeah, yeah, Robert Frost. Two roads diverge in a yellow wood. But I have another road. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life.

1:16:31This week in This American Life, when Angela's family goes on vacation, her dad plans everything. One year, the plan went awry. I don't think I was particularly traumatized. Wow, you went like you got hit by lightning. Like lightning's not personal. The lightning wasn't like, Angela, you're ugly. The lightning was just doing its thing. When nature, fate, or the federal government mess with your plans, that's next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station.

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