On December 7, 2023, at mid-morning, Israeli soldiers pointed their weapons under the windows of Ayman Lubbad, in Beit Lahya, in the far north of the Gaza Strip, and ordered residents of the neighborhood to come out of their homes. house, one by one. The men were forced to undress. The 31-year-old Palestinian, lawyer and researcher for the Palestinian human rights NGO Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), found himself in his underwear among his neighbors, all in a row, kneeling on a sidewalk.
In recent weeks, mass arrests in Gaza have been revealed by dozens of videos, often filmed by the soldiers themselves. The scenario is almost always the same: the soldiers besiege a block of homes, shouting the names of families in the area into megaphones. The children are pushed aside. Sometimes the women are separated from them, and some have to remove their veils and are arrested.
The men, from their teens to their sixties, are systematically arrested and stripped naked – the army says it fears that they are wearing explosive belts, but assures that“they are allowed to get dressed as quickly as possible”. Videos and testimonials collected by The world show on the contrary that the prisoners are kept half-naked for hours. “Some of the videos are very humiliating for the people who are detained, it is a clear violation of international law”notes Ajith Sunghay, head of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The Israeli army denies carrying out random arrests: according to it, these men are “terrorist activity suspects”. After the Hamas attacks on October 7, which left 1,200 dead in Israel, the Jewish state carried out a bombing campaign of unprecedented intensity on Gaza and ordered residents of the north of the enclave to flee towards the center and south, mid-October, before launching its land invasion. More than 24,000 Palestinians were killed, the majority women and children. In the eyes of the army, those who remained in the north of the Gaza Strip are necessarily suspects. Ayman Lubbad could not leave. “My wife had just given birth at the end of October”explains the lawyer, reached by telephone in Rafah in the south of the enclave, where he took refuge after his release.
“Deliberate targeting”
Once rounded up, Palestinian detainees are identified using a facial recognition system, then taken, for the most part, outside their neighborhood. “Some reported that they heard gunshots and that people who were with them did not return. We assume that many were killed in extrajudicial executions. We have no videos or direct witnesses, but corpses were found, naked, their bodies riddled with bullets”reports Raji Sourani, director of PCHR, who speaks to World by telephone from Cairo.
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