Kuteiba Abu Remaila Tamimi, left, and Mohammed Ghanem.Credit: Alex Levac

The marks etched into his wrists by the plastic handcuffs are still visible, two weeks after he was left shackled for an entire night, although he was not accused of any wrongdoing.

Kuteiba Abu Remaila Tamimi is a good-looking man of 25, whose hair, beard and attire are black, and who had the misfortune to be born, grow up and live in Hebron’s Sleima neighborhood, which lies between the urban settlement of Kiryat Arba and the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Life in this all-but-forsaken neighborhood was always hellish for Palestinians, between the violent settlers and the army, along with the Border Police. But since the war broke out in Gaza, people here, like everywhere in the West Bank, can only look back fondly on the previous inferno, the pre-war hell.

In Hebron apartheid has always appeared in its most violent form, nasty and brutish. Anyone who is not a Jew is doomed here to a life of intolerable cruelty. Since the start of the war, hardly anyone in the neighborhood dares to leave their home: Every foray into the street brings down on them settlers, the army or both. Until April they were forbidden by order to go out almost at all. Prisoners in their homes. Tamimi’s story is the story of the neighborhood, the story of the capital of Israeli apartheid.

Tamimi studied cooking and hotel management at a Ramallah college, and became a chef. Once the war began, he lost his job at a Hebron hamburger restaurant called Baguetta, because he was unable to get to his workplace for months, even in his own city. Besides the tens of thousands of Palestinians who lost their places of employ in Israel, there are those who have found themselves without work in their own towns and villages because they are effectively imprisoned in their homes. The economic situation continues its downward spiral.

Tamimi in an ambulance, after being beaten by Israeli troops.Credit: B’Tselem

Until January, Tamimi’s neighborhood was under a total closure, with no one entering, no one departing. From January until April, the spirit of Israeli freedom allowed the neighborhood’s residents to leave the quarter between 7 and 8 A.M., and to return between 7 and 8 in the evening, and only at those times. Palestinian cars have been banned from entering the neighborhood for years; even an ambulance requires prior coordination. The streets are for Jews only. Three of the seven families living adjacent to Tamimi’s family have abandoned the neighborhood since the war started – whoever can get out, does so.

Not his family. His father has a heart ailment, and up until October 7, Tamimi was the sole provider for his parents and his brother. Now that too is a thing of the past. The children are also afraid to go outside to play, because they face intimidation by settlers and soldiers. Whenever there’s a group of children in the street, Tamimi relates, the white van of the Jewish “security squad” shows up and chases them home. Fences have been erected on the rooftops, too, in order to block movement from house to house via the roofs, which until the war was the only way to visit neighbors.

Since April, almost complete freedom – in Hebronite terms – has prevailed. Residents may enter or leave the neighborhood at any time between 7 A.M. and 7 P.M. A dream come true. Except that almost every day some soldier gets the urge to shut down the checkpoint, for no obvious reason, and then there’s a wait of a few hours. The result is that one can’t take a job that requires leaving the neighborhood on a regular basis.

Tamimi shut himself up in the house. For the past nine months he has rarely left it. Sometimes there are weeks on end of being idle at home. Instead of frying hamburgers, he plays computer games with young people across the globe almost until dawn, which is when he goes to sleep. That’s his life. Their life.

Israeli soldiers in Hebron, this week.Credit: AFP

“I don’t leave the house, because if I go out I’m almost always attacked by soldiers or settlers for no reason,” he says. “And if I go to a friend and sit with him on the roof, soldiers immediately show up and tell us to get inside – including [the roof of] my own house, which doesn’t overlook any settlers’ homes or any military facility.”

On Monday, July 8, he was sitting in his room as usual at the computer and playing Counter-Strike, wearing headphones. At about midnight, when everyone was already sleeping, he heard the sounds of stun grenades from the street. Hurrying to the window, he saw soldiers running about. He wrote his friends that something was happening in the neighborhood, and then went back to his game. Returning to the window a few minutes later, he saw soldiers removing all the residents from the nearby houses. Among them was a 75-year-old neighbor, in an undershirt; there were also other elderly folk who had been forcibly awakened and ordered to go outside.

Later it would turn out that the security cameras that monitor the life of the neighborhood 24/7 had picked up a group of children who were trying to move the concertina wire that blocks entry and departure from the street. Israel’s guardian slumbers not, and within a quarter of an hour an army unit had raided the neighborhood and thrown the men onto the street in their pajamas.

Tamimi’s father, Adel, 57, the heart patient, was also hustled into the street, along with Kuteiba and his brother Yazen. A 5-month-old nephew cried when soldiers entered the house and ordered his father out. Between 10 and 15 men, aged 18 to 75, stood in the street after midnight at the soldiers’ orders because of some coils of barbed wire. The soldiers photographed them and took their ID cards. Maybe an arch-terrorist was lurking among them. Someone tried to ask what they had done wrong and was told by a soldier to shut up. A jeep pulled up and the troops it was carrying showed the Palestinians the golden piece of evidence: an incriminating video of the concertina wire being moved by children, who then fled the scene. “Look, you son of a bitch,” the soldier snarled at one man.

The handcuff marks on Tamimi’s hand, this week.Credit: B’Tselem

The soldiers peppered them with a volley of curses – their standard mode of speech when talking with Palestinians. Ordering Kuteiba and Yazen to accompany them, they marched them to a spot a few dozen meters from their house and ordered them to get down on their knees, facing the wall. They stayed like that for about 20 minutes. In the meantime, one of their neighbors was ordered to return the barbed wire to its natural place. Tamimi’s father asked why two of his sons had been taken away. “Your sons on my dick,” was the reply he received.

The two brothers were meanwhile undergoing a brief educational lesson: Where are you from? From here. No, from what country? From Palestine. Shu? Shu? What!? Where would you like us to be from? What do you want us to say? There is no such thing as Palestine. Israel. You’re from Israel. So the two brothers declaimed that message at the soldiers’ command in Palestinian Hebron in the dead of night. Then they were made to curse Hamas: Kus ukhtak, Hamas ("Screw your sister, Hamas). The two were cuffed with their hands in front of them and the troops got into the jeep and ordered them to run alongside it, for 500 meters, to the nearby army base, near the entrance to Kiryat Arba. Then their eyes were covered with plastic blindfolds, instead of the old flannelette.

The soldiers, they relate, now started to pummel and kick them, each soldier in turn. Then they made the Tamimi brothers kneel again; after a time, when they tried to shift their position they were kicked and slapped. A pail was then placed over Kuteiba’s head – it stank and made it hard for him to breathe, he recalls. Shortly afterward the pail was placed over Yazen’s head. Then the soldiers kicked a ball at the two, over and over, before whipping them with a belt. One soldier filmed the events for TikTok while talking to his girlfriend, telling her proudly about the beating, Tamimi says. Another soldier kicked him in the back. The troops also poured beer over them – he recognizes the smell.

This went on until 4 A.M. Kuteiba heard the muezzin’s call to the dawn prayers. Then, a new shift started. The soldiers led the brothers up a staircase, and Kuteiba was afraid they would throw them down. His eyes were still covered. All this time the Tamimis weren’t given water or access to a toilet. “What did we do?” he asked one of the soldiers in English. “It’s collective punishment,” came the reply.

At 11 in the morning, Yazen fainted or was on the verge of passing out, suffering from stomach pain. According to Kuteiba, the soldiers became scared and released them both quickly. Almost 12 hours had elapsed since they had been taken into custody. The troops took them to the entrance gate of the base; they removed the blindfolds but sent the brothers on their way still handcuffed. They also did not get their ID cards back. A Palestinian ambulance that was summoned to the site by a passerby took the two to a Hebron hospital to be examined. They were subject to various forms of hazing for hours over the next two days as they made efforts to retrieve the IDs, until they were finally told they wouldn’t get them back. They were compelled to obtain new ID cards, which is far from a simple matter.

Ghanem, this week.Credit: Alex Levac

Two younger people joined our conversation: Yusef Bader, 19, and his friend Mohammed Ghanem, 18, both of them students of “smart” construction. Each wore a T-shirt with an inscription emblazoned on it in English – Bader’s read “Great things take time,” and Ghanem’s, “Break the rules.” Around midday on July 8, the same day on which Kuteiba would later be detained, the two friends were heading for a restaurant in Bethlehem. A soldier stopped them at Hebron’s northern exit checkpoint, which isn’t always manned, and ordered them out of the car, which the troops then proceeded to search. They also checked the phones of the two teens.

Ghanem, whose baby face makes him appear younger than his years, had a new iPhone 13, in which the soldier discovered, alas and alack, an odd AI-generated image of an IDF soldier carrying two infants in his arms. A caption under the photo reads, in broken English, “Do you know That Isreali soldiers has three hands???”

Ghanem’s fate was sealed. He was thrust into a jeep, and for the next 40 minutes the soldiers drove around as he lay on the floor of the vehicle being beaten and humiliated. He was blindfolded, and two of the fingers on each hand were tied together. He remembers mostly noise in his ears from the drive. In the end, he was dumped near the village of Bani Naim. He sat on the ground in a state of shock.

The image from Ghanem’s phone that sealed his fate. In Hebron apartheid has always appeared in its most violent form, nasty and brutish.

His cell phone wasn’t returned. Three days later, a Palestinian merchant called to tell him that he had bought his device for 1,000 shekels ($275; new it goes for three times that price). He asked Ghanem to buy it from him for the same amount. Ghanem’s family submitted a complaint to the Palestinian police.

The IDF Spokesperson provided the following statement to Haaretz this week: "In the first incident, in contrast to the claim [in your article], IDF forces were not active in the Sleima neighborhood on the night in question. The identifying details of one of the brothers were checked by the IDF, and it was found that he was detained the following evening at another roadblock in the city for a routine check, and subsequently released. We are not familiar with the reporter’s claim regarding the use of violence against the two brothers.

“With regard to the second incident, the individual mentioned was detained at a roadblock for a routine check, and released after several minutes. The additional claims, including the claim regarding use of violence and the theft of a telephone are not familiar. To the extent that we receive other complaints, they will be investigated as is the norm.”

Gideon Levy, Alex Levac

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