The stories of Tamer and Firas Rasem Al Rimawi

By Rima Merriman

Fathieh Abdul Aziz Abdul Jaber Al Rimawi of Beit Rima has been a widow since 1995. She was the second wife of her husband Rasem Saleem and lives in a two-bedroom apartment with her three sons and two daughters in a compound that also houses her late husband's first wife and the families of the latter's sons, five apartments in all.

Fathieh teaches history at the local public school for girls. Two of her sons, Tamer, 23, and Firas, 21, are in Israeli prisons. The third son, Saleem, 22, who trained as a car mechanic through the YMCA in Jericho, is unemployed. Her daughter Hiba is about to finish high school, and the youngest, Haya, is in tenth grade. Rasem Saleem, with help from his sons, built the compound for his family from his earnings as a driver of a public transport car on the Ramallah-Beit Rima route.

When Tamer's father died, his mother placed him in an orphanage in Jerusalem where he was trained as a typesetter and book binder. In August 2000, at 19, he was able to secure an internship at Dar Al Funoon (House of Arts) in Betunia (near Ramallah), but barely a month into this job, he was forced to quit. By then, the Israelis had blocked the roads all over the West Bank and Gaza, and commuting to Betunia became impossible. The following month, he was hit by an Israeli rubber bullet while demonstrating in downtown Ramallah and had to stay in hospital for a few days because his injury festered. He then worked for a few months with the Palestinian National Authority, intending to join the intelligence unit, but did not get along with his boss and quit.

Fathieh and her family first knew that Tamer was being pursued by the Israeli forces on Oct. 20, 2002, when soldiers stormed her home in the early hours of the morning, forced the family out into the street and ransacked the house. Tamer was not at home that night. On hearing the news the following day, he fled his home and remained on the run for a whole year, until his arrest.

During the year when Tamer was in hiding, Israeli soldiers would frequently come to Fathieh's house, sometimes three or four times a day, so much so that the neighbourhood children started playing tricks on the family, knocking on the door and mimicking the soldiers: "Come out, come out." Each time, the soldiers would ransack the house causing a lot of damage. They would pile clothes and schoolbooks on the floor and pour oil on them; they would throw furniture and kitchen utensils into the street. They would damage closet doors and windows and force locks open.

The Israelis would also threaten Fathieh with house demolition. Once they went so far as to bring a bulldozer along with them and took measurements of the distances between Fathieh's apartment and her neighbours' houses, as well as notes on the construction materials used to build the house. They told Fathieh that they would start demolition in 30 minutes. The family (all the inhabitants of the five apartments in the family compound) was locked in the downstairs apartment and countdown commenced - 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes. When they got down to zero, the Israelis moved the bulldozer to a few inches away from the house and stopped. All this was by way of harassment, since a military order to demolish the house could not be given before Tamer was arrested and sentenced.

Fathieh knows the Israeli officers who conducted these harassments only by their first names: Rasmi and Iyas. They spoke Arabic and tried to pressure her to tell them where her son was hiding. She, in turn, would argue with them that Tamer had nothing to do with the building of the house they were threatening to demolish, that she was trying to bring up her fatherless children on a teacher's salary. She would tell them that she hadn't seen her son for a long time, that if they did catch him, please bring him to her because she missed him and would like to embrace him.

For four or five months, Tamer slept out in the wild near Beit Rima. It was winter and bitter cold. One of his legs got infected and became swollen, so his friends moved him to Ramallah, where he sometimes slept in parked cars. After that, he stayed at Yasser Arafat's compound until the Israelis demanded that all the youths finding refuge there be handed over. Tamer and a friend, Ali Al Aliyan, fled again and began to shuttle between two apartments in Betunia and Ramallah.

On the morning of May 28, 2003, Tamer's sisters Haya and Hiba were at home sleeping in late because it was the first day of their summer vacation. Fathiyeh was at school, finishing up her grading for the year. Hiba was surprised to hear her brother Tamer's voice on the phone. He sounded choked. He wanted to talk to his mother because, he told his sister, it might be the last time in his life he could talk to her. He reported quickly that soldiers had surrounded the nine-storey apartment building in Betunia where he and his friend Ali were hiding. He then hung up. Distraught, Hiba called her brothers first, and then her mother, who came running back home. No one knew where the apartment in question was until word came through Fathieh's principal that Al Bazar building in Betunia was being hit.

The family turned on the TV, and there, on Al Jazeera, Fathieh saw live what was happening to her son. The siege lasted from 8:30am until 4:00pm and the building was shelled 28 times. Tanks were stationed in Al Teereh School overlooking the apartment, as well as in the immediate vicinity of the building where over 300 soldiers were amassed. Everyone in the building had responded to the evacuation order except for Tamer and Ali, who were holed up in the roof apartment resisting arrest with two guns and a Kalashnikov. Smoke was rising from the building. At one point, Tamer and Ali stopped shooting back, and Al Jazeera reported that they had been killed. The family kept this piece of news from Fathieh, but when friends started to crowd into her home, she feared the worst.

In Betunia, the Israelis were preparing to blow up the apartment building. The building owner explained to them that there was a three-tonne gas container in the basement, and by destroying the building, they would destroy the whole neighbourhood. Other Beit Rima men living in the neighbourhood were trying to find a way to get Tamer and Ali out alive. They called Azmi Bishara and Ahmed Tibi, Palestinian-Israeli Knesset members and asked them to intervene. Saleem, Tamer's brother, was at the scene by then and went in with the Israeli soldiers in an attempt to prevent the shooting of his brother.

Meanwhile, Tamer and Ali had sneaked up on the roof, opened the cover to a shaft that goes down the length of the building and that contains pipes and electric wiring and managed to climb all the way down. They were spotted, though and dragged out, half naked in their pyjamas and blindfolded. Tamer had several injuries to his head, back, arms and legs. When Saleem finally got to where his brother was, Israeli soldiers took the blindfold off Tamer and told him they had a surprise for him, making him think that Saleem had also been arrested. During the following three months that Tamer spent at Maskoubieh being interrogated and tortured, he kept asking about Saleem.

At Tamer's first hearing in Ofar, his weight was down by 20kg and the effects of torture were visible on him, especially where he had been hit in the head. He had also spent time in hospital, according to the Red Cross. When Tamer mentioned the torture to the military judge, he was told that the Israeli Intelligence Service is allowed to use any method it likes in order to extract information from prisoners. He added that the hearing was not for discussion; they were there simply to extend his arrest term.

Tamer is now in Hadreem in solitary confinement and is yet to be sentenced. His family has been denied visitation and the repeated appeals Fathieh has lodged with various human rights organisations have not had any effect. Hiba, Tamer's sister, has a poem Tamer wrote while at Hadreem. Here are a few lines: "When they are done pouring icy water on me, there is the electric shock, followed by scalding water/And when I cry in pain, they intensify the torture/They want to terrorise me/They want to make me tell on others/But to me death is easier than betrayal/I will resist in this arena all by myself."

Two days after Tamer's arrest, Fathieh was horrified to find Israeli soldiers again at her door, this time to arrest her son Firas, a social work major at Al Quds Open University in Nablus. The following day was the first day of his finals for the year and he was at home studying. The Israelis took him to Halmeesh Military Centre, which is close to the Israeli settlement by the same name, and set dogs loose at him, tearing his clothes off. Then the soldiers took him to Beit Eel and from there to Ofar, where he suffered through 24 days of investigations and torture but had nothing to confess. Accusations against him are that he is a member of Kataeb Al Aqsa, that he has helped his brother in unspecified ways and that he knew people who later performed a suicide operation. He was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison and two-and-a-half more "in reserve". Only his sisters can get permission to visit him.

Thursday, October 28, 2004