Broken Bodies, Shattered Lives

By Catherine M. Willford

In June of 1988, 18-year-old Maysoon Salem was returning from school to her home in the West Bank Deheishe refugee camp when she came upon soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) beating a 13-year-old boy. As she cried out, "Leave him alone," one of the soldiers spun around, and shot her in the forearm with a soft-nosed "dum-dum" bullet.

When a woman neighbor tried to drive Maysoon to the hospital, the car was stopped at a military roadblock and not allowed to leave the camp. Maysoon, cradling her profusely bleeding arm, and a cousin then walked to the main road where a Palestinian woman who happened down the road took them to Mt. David Hospital in Bethlehem, which specializes in bone injuries.

That night doctors operated on Maysoon's arm for three hours, struggling to save it from amputation. Maysoon's arm was saved, but she will never have normal use of it again, despite subsequent treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, provided by the Naim Foundation.

Maysoon is no stranger to the hardships of Israeli occupation. A younger brother is serving a five-year sentence in Hebron Jail. Another is imprisoned in Israel's Ansar III concentration camp in the Negev Desert. A third brother was recently released from the same camp after being held without charges for four months. Her father and sisters-in-law were beaten in the course of one brother's arrest. Surprisingly, this young woman who has suffered so much takes a position of compromise and reconciliation for peace.

"We feel the desire for the exiles of 1948 to return home and live in peace and equality, but for peace's sake we're willing to accept living in a Palestinian state alongside Israel," Maysoon said at a press conference sponsored by the Union of Palestinian Women's Associations (UPWA), held May 26 in Washington, DC.

Also addressing the conference was 19-year-old Ferial Khatib, a US resident alien, whose life was shattered one August night last year when IDF soldiers surrounded her family's house in Beit Hanina, a suburb of Jerusalem.

Soldiers entered and questioned her about her husband's whereabouts. Told to have her husband report the next day to Room 4 of Moscobiyya Prison for interrogation, Ferial was terrified. "We all know what goes on there," she said. "Whoever goes in there never comes out the same, if they return at all."

Ferial's husband, Nabil Mustafa lbdah, took the call to Room 4 as a death sentence. "I don't think I'll be coming back," he said, imploring her to take care of their 4-month-old son, Thier. After several days, during which no family member was allowed to see him, the family was informed that Nabil had hung himself in his cell, although he was only three inches shorter than the height of his cell. When his body was returned to the family in the middle of the following night, Ferial saw the results of his "interrogation."

"He was bruised all over, bones were coming out of his arm, and we saw a big cut from his neck all the way down to his stomach and sewn back up," she recalls. Reporters called by the family to photograph the body were stopped and beaten by the IDF On the way to bury Nabil, Ferial was ordered into a jeep by two soldiers. As the jeep took off at a high speed, Ferial, fearing that she, too, was en route to Room 4, risked her life by jumping out of the moving vehicle. The jeep circled around and headed straight for her. Miraculously, she reports, she was able to jump out of its path and escape.

As a US resident, Ferial is asking Congress to investigate all such dubious "suicide" claims.