Children of Curfew
Last week, I wrote about my memory of the first night of the Israeli invasion that launched Operation Defensive Shield in March 2002, when all major Palestinian towns in the West Bank were declared closed military zones and one million civilians were placed under round-the-clock curfews. This week, I speak to some of my childhood friends about their memories of this period.
But first, some notes about curfews.
The Israeli-imposed curfews of 2002 were round-the-clock, meaning that we were confined to our homes for undetermined periods, unable to buy food, without access to medical and humanitarian aid, and with frequent cuts in our electricity and water supply. We were unable to go to school or work, and the Palestinian economy was decimated.
While indoors, we would stay away from windows and balconies, fearful of snipers and stray bullets. We were immobilised and terrified, even within our own homes. We lost so much, some of which will always remain immeasurable.
Every now and again, but with no discernable pattern, the curfew would be lifted for a couple of hours. During this period, shopkeepers would rush to open their diminishing supply of non-perishables to the public, and bakers to their ovens to prepare bread. We would often have to search around town for a while to find what we needed, watching the clock anxiously to make sure we made it home in time.
Communication about these breaks in the curfew was poor, as they were usually announced in two ways: via megaphone from a moving army jeep, in Arabic so patchy it was barely comprehensible, and through phone calls by the Israeli army to key businesses (such as bakeries, supermarkets, or pharmacies), who would then spread the word. To add to this chaos, curfew breaks weren’t always uniform across neighbourhoods and Israeli military units often seemed oblivious - purposefully or not - to what was happening in nearby areas.
Curfews were enforced through the use of live ammunition, tear gas and other instruments of war by Israeli soldiers stationed inside Palestinian towns. This was facilitated by the basic infrastructure of occupation: during the Second Intifada, Israel operated around 140 checkpoints within the West Bank. The army had also damaged 42 per cent of the West Bank’s infrastructure by 2002, making population control 42 per cent easier.
We were living witnesses to the practice of “urbicide”: a term often used to refer to the deliberate destruction of urban environments as a method of warfare during the Bosnian War.
Humanitarian access to the West Bank was so restricted during Operation Defensive Shield that there is little data on the exact number of days we spent under curfew in March, April and early May 2002. All I can tell you is that we lost so much to the curfews.
My birthday is at the end of May, so I was lucky enough to celebrate it with my friends after the army left the city. We played together outdoors, ecstatic after so much time apart and inside.
In June 2002, after a welcome but devastatingly short month-long retreat, the Israeli army reinvaded our city during Operation Determined Path, a second phase of sorts to Operation Defensive Shield. From June until the end of the year, Israel resumed its policy of blanket curfews.
There is a lot more data on this period. Residents of Ramallah spent 138 out of the 197 days between 17 June and 31 December under curfew - that’s 70 per cent of the time. Residents of the northern city of Nablus had it even worse. They spent 197 out of the 197 days under curfew - I think you can work out that percentage.
The scale and nature of the collective punishment inflicted on Palestinian civilians in 2002 were so severe that Amnesty International considered “that it may amount to torture as defined in article 1 of the Convention against Torture.”
But curfews were hardly a new phenomenon.
The imposition of curfews dates back to 1967 when Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. It declared the Palestinian territories a closed military zone and placed them under curfew.
Curfews were imposed again in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War.
During the First Intifada (1987-1993), an astonishing 7,800 curfews were imposed on Palestinian communities in three years.
Israel also imposed an open-ended blanket curfew on the West Bank and Gaza at the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991. Human Rights Watch referred to it as “the most severe act of collective punishment of the twenty-four-year occupation.”
Between 1988 and 1995 - that’s seven years - Palestinian residents of Gaza were subject to a night-time curfew, which was imposed after a sustained period of popular protest against the Israeli occupation. Jewish settlers in Gaza were exempt from this curfew.
Throughout the decades, an essential component of Israels’s curfew formula has been to declare entire communities closed military zones. This allows the army to restrict journalistic and humanitarian access, and, under the guise of security, act with impunity towards unarmed civilians - including children.
My friend Ali and I had lived in the same building since we were both toddlers, and we were good friends. We were both adventurous and restless, and we often raced each other climbing up trees or riding our bicycles downhill. Ali was 12 when the curfew began.
We are both in our early thirties now, but it’s the first time we’ve ever spoken about what happened twenty-one years ago.
Ali, too, remembers the weekly protests by the City Inn Hotel that I previously wrote about. Protestors, mainly young men, would gather near the hotel, which faced a military settlement, and throw stones at Israeli forces. They were usually met with an armed response, including rubber bullets, tear gas and live ammunition. We lived a six-minute walk from the location of these protests and could hear them clearly from inside our homes.
“I believe the shootings at these protests were my first exposure to live weaponry,” Ali says. “It happened so frequently that I became able to recognise, just by sound, the type of gun being used.”
I smile at this reference, as it takes me back to the days when I would stand in the hallway of our building with Ali and our other friends, where we would listen for the sound of bullets before shouting out our best guesses for weapons and calibres - a game born out of the boredom of home confinement.
Another childhood friend and neighbour, Shatha, who was 11 at the time, remembers this game too. “We would also try and guess whether the sounds were coming from a tank, helicopter, or an F-16,” she reminds me. “I still wake up in the middle of the night to these sounds in my head.”
Ali has vivid memories of the night of the first ground invasion, on Friday 29 March 2002.
“I woke up at around 4 am to the sound of a really heavy machine gun; nothing like the sound of what I used to hear coming from the City Inn Hotel,” he recalls. “I remember jumping from my bed and running towards the veranda. This was a room with big windows and a view of the northeast, from where the army approached.”
It strikes me how both Ali and I were, at the ages of ten and twelve, aware of the direction from which the Israeli army invaded.
“Back then, the mountains around us were almost empty, with no buildings,” he says. “I found my father by the window, looking at this huge, weirdly shaped machine on the mountain. It turned out to be an Israeli tank. As the shooting progressed I ran to my parents’ room to hide in bed with my mother.
I remember my father coming into the room and saying: “The Israelis are invading the city.” The sounds of heavy machinery started to get closer to our building. My dad told us to stay away from the windows. We moved to the central room of the house, the one furthest from any external walls.”
The way Ali describes his father’s reaction to the invasion reminds me of that of my own father; matter-of-fact, with no words of comfort, and a laser-sharp focus on the family’s safety. There is no time for coddling in a life-or-death situation.
Ali continues:
“I couldn’t help but sneak to the window to try and understand what was making these noises. I saw dark, heavy objects pass by our window one by one, heading south.”
South - towards the city centre.
The sounds of heavy machinery, gunfire and shelling progressed as the army captured our neighbourhood street by street. They were securing the entire area, which just so happened to be in between the military settlement, from which the army was invading the city, and the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, which the army besieged.
Our building’s residents began to realise the severity of the invasion, and we feared that aerial bombardment might follow. Palestinians have neither air raid sirens nor bomb shelters, so all we could do was try and find the likeliest space for survival and stay there as long as we could. One of our neighbours was an architect, and we relied on him to point us to the parts of the building that were least likely to collapse onto us.
“My father asked us all to get out of our third-floor apartment and head downstairs, as it was safer there,” Ali remembers. “There, we saw that all of our neighbours had gathered downstairs for safety.”
When the invasion began, Palestinian resistance fighters started to mobilise and head towards strategic areas, including our neighbourhood. We could hear them whispering outside our building.
“I remember one of the resistance fighters got into the front yard of our building,” Ali says. “The neighbours had to politely ask him to leave, as having him on the premises was dangerous for us.”
The electricity had been cut by the invading army, so our building’s residents spent a long night in darkness, listening and waiting, unsure of what was happening outside.
“Later,” Ali says, “a gigantic tank stopped in front of our building and stayed there for weeks. That was the very first time that I saw an Israeli tank.”
We woke up to the strange sight of a battle tank in the parking lot of the residential building opposite ours. As you can see in the photograph, which was taken hastily from our flat, the building opposite us was only half-complete at the time. Its residents were ordered to keep their front doors closed at all times while the army set up base. A sniper was permanently positioned on the top floor, its rifle scanning the streets night and day.
This marked the start of the first curfew.
Ali recalls:
“There was an almost complete 24-hour curfew during the first couple of weeks of the invasion. All families started running out of rations and clean water. I remember that we started collecting rainwater from the roof of the building and storing it in our bathtubs.
I remember ambulances going around the neighbourhood to distribute rations as there was no way for us to go out for groceries.
I remember not being able to come close to any windows as the Israeli army was stationed right across the street from us.”
The collection of rainwater is something that stands out in my memories, too. It was, in fact, Ali who knocked on our door one day to ask whether we had any large containers - buckets, barrels, or anything else - to add to the growing collection of objects on the roof. It went without saying that any water we collected would be distributed equally amongst the building’s residents. We lost so much, but we were always in it together.
I consider myself lucky to have spent the curfews in an apartment building with children my age. Every day, we snuck into other’s homes through the central hallway to play. Still, home confinement was excruciating.
Occasionally, the Israeli army would announce a break in the curfew. Shatha remembers one such break in particular:
“I was walking back from a nearby supermarket, where I had gone to buy some milk and bread after what seemed an eternity indoors. As I turned the corner of our street, I saw a military jeep coming towards me at full speed.
My mother, father, and one of our neighbours were standing in our courtyard. They began shouting at me. “Don’t run!” they kept saying.
I had the discipline to keep it together and continue walking slowly. Running away, even out of fear, might give the soldiers a reason to suspect me and shoot. Thankfully, the soldiers just drove past me.”
Ali remembers a similar incident during a break in the curfew:
“My brother and I got on our bikes to buy groceries from a local shop that was perhaps two kilometres away. On our way back we started hearing a loud noise, which turned out to be a military vehicle. It drove up behind us.
This is my worst memory as I remember the soldiers fucking around with us and trying to intimidate us, pretending they were going to run us over. After that, I never went out to get groceries during curfew breaks again.”
Ali and his brother got away by abandoning their bicycles behind our local sweet shop, cutting through an open field, and crawling through a hole in our building’s fence. This hole had been there for years. Before the intifada, we use to crawl through it while playing hide and seek, running into the field and crouching behind bushes, waiting to be found.
We were raised in this neighbourhood, and we knew its secrets like the back of our hand. As advanced as the Israeli military was, it was still a foreign occupier, and it was outsmarted by two young boys who knew more than one way home.
A thought gnaws at me. I ask Ali if he thinks the soldiers would have acted similarly if he and his brother had been girls.
“No, I don’t think so,” he answers. “If we were girls, I think the vehicle would have just passed by us. But they also seemed encouraged by our fear and desperation to get away from them. I think it made them want to bully us more. This was when I seriously felt fear, more than the night of the invasion.”
Ali’s fear was entirely reasonable: during Operation Defensive Shield, 55 children were killed by the Israeli army, 85 per cent of whom were boys.
We often think of women as particularly vulnerable in times of conflict. This is true: in Palestine, the impact of the occupation on women is distinct and pronounced. What is also true, however, is that long-standing Zionist perceptions of Palestinians put Palestinian boys in exceptional danger.
This can be traced as far back as April 1948, one month before the establishment of the State of Israel. Zionist militias had been operating in the territory of historical Palestine, conducting systematic attacks aimed to disperse the indigenous population and make space for a Jewish state.
They began to strategise a policy towards any people left in the villages they occupied. One of their guidelines was to either kill or send to a prison camp, at the discretion of the local commander, “men at a fighting age.” The command clearly defined what was meant by men: anyone above the age of ten.
Ilan Pappé argues that “it began there, that children are potential terrorists, are potential enemies, they’re not just children.” In other words, Israel’s targeting of Palestinian children, particularly of boys, is neither incidental nor accidental.
This brings us to Kindy, the son of one of my father’s close friends. I have fond memories of visiting Kindy’s family in their home in the old city of Ramallah, a stunning old building with walls as thick as the length of my arms and windows arched in a dramatic u-shape.
During these visits, our fathers would sit in the lounge and talk - about history, philosophy, and culture - while we played in and around the house. Kindy’s mother would always send us home with a sandwich bag full of sweets.
Kindy was 14 years old when he was shot in the leg during a break in the curfew, when the Israeli army suddenly began firing at Palestinians who had left their homes to buy food, water and essential goods.
Kindy’s sister, Maral, was 25 at the time. She recounts:
“I still remember that day as if it were yesterday. We heard that the army was giving us a three-hour break from the curfew, and we decided that each of us will do our part. I went one way to buy vegetables and fruits, and my father and Kindy went to get the rest of the essentials.”
Suddenly, Maral heard shots. She turned around and saw her father running towards her with Kindy. “It was a terrible feeling when I saw how much my brother was bleeding. My mother lost consciousness when she heard that her son had been injured,” Maral tells me.
They called an ambulance, but every time it tried to reach Kindy, the Israeli army began to shoot again, and the ambulance had to turn back. In the end, it took a full hour for an ambulance - operated by two Italian medics - to reach them.
The incident, including the shooting of civilians and the delay in the ambulance’s arrival, was documented by the human rights NGO Defence for Children International.
Kindy was badly injured. He was later told that he was shot in the leg with an expanding bullet, also known as a dumdum - a type of bullet designed to expand upon impact, causing grievous harm. The use of expanding bullets is prohibited by international law, and their use is considered a war crime by the International Criminal Court.
It is exceptionally difficult to find data on Israel’s use of expanding bullets. However, in the early 2000s eyewitnesses and medics consistently referred to injuries they say wouldn’t have resulted from regular bullets: large impact wounds, twice the diameter or more of a conventional bullet injury, with unusual fragmentation of metal inside the body. More on this in next week’s essay.
I ask Kindy if he remembers how close the soldier who shot him was. Turns out, the soldier was in a tank, half-concealed by the vehicle’s open hatch. The tank was 50 to 100 meters from Kindy.
The mark III Merkava, the primary tank used by the Israeli army at the time, has secondary armament consisting of three 7.62mm machine guns, which have an effective range of 800 meters - that’s eight to sixteen times the distance at which Kindy was shot.
“Do you know who the doctor is that treated me?” Kindy asks me.
I pause and answer that I don’t know, but I can sense where this is going.
“Your dad,” he answers. “I owe him my life. If I had been treated by anyone else I would have lost my leg.”
My father doesn’t speak much about what he encountered during the intifada. Like many Palestinian doctors who specialised in conventional areas such as cardiology and paediatrics, he was forced to become a war doctor, providing emergency treatment for complex injuries sustained from advanced weaponry. He never told me that he treated Kindy.
Maral recalls the moment they finally reached the hospital with Kindy:
“Your dad was waiting for us at the main door. Kindy was bleeding and screaming from the pain, and I was trying to be strong and not to cry. But when we reached the hospital, tears flooded my face. Your dad took me aside. I was about to start a new job as a nurse, so he gave me the medical treatment orders that I needed to follow and the medication to give Kindy once we returned home.”
Returning home wasn’t easy, though. Kindy had undergone surgery for his injury and he had survived, but he now had to make his way home under heavy fire, as a confrontation had started outside the hospital. It took the family two hours to reach their house, which is normally a fifteen-minute drive from the hospital.
I ask Kindy whether he can share anything about how the shooting affected him.
He answers:
“You know, I moved to Los Angeles 8 years ago, and this only really hit me recently. Growing up in Palestine, we’re basically grownups from the age of seven or eight. We don’t have a childhood, or at least not a peaceful, normal one.
Most of our memories involve some kind of violence. Unfortunately, our life is all about survival. We all suffer from PTSD in one form or another. It’s always in the back of our heads.
After I was shot, every time I used to go through a checkpoint or face an Israeli soldier I would have symptoms of a panic attack: fear, shortness of breath, and dizziness. My body would shake.”
Maral, who had to take care of her brother’s wound while he healed, tells me she suffered a lot in the aftermath of what happened. Treating her patients would bring up memories of her brother’s pain. Today, she works as a journalist, and she is still haunted by the memory of this day whenever she covers stories of violence.
It is particularly difficult for Palestinians to process our traumas because we are raised by grandparents, parents and a society that have their own traumas, too.
Our experiences are part of an ongoing, collective and generational trauma in which it can feel difficult - wrong, even - to make space for individual narratives.
Kindy adds:
“Also, take into consideration that we live in a very patriarchal society. If you’re a man, you are expected to act like an alpha male. And forget about speaking openly about panic attacks, anxiety, or other mental health issues.”
Violence on the scale of war, occupation, and curfews dehumanises, destroys, and eviscerates. It takes you by the throat and tears you from the ground. It holds you there, suspended.
It tells you: you are nobody. I will take everything from you if I please. Your land is mine. Your home is mine. Your family is mine. Your childhood is mine. Your body is mine.
It tells you: I do as I please. I will burn your land. I will flatten your home. I will take your family. I will hijack your childhood. I will command your body.
It tells you: you are nothing. I will hold you by the throat until you are nothing but a number.
This hold is confined by neither time nor space. It lives and festers in our bodies, even if we mentally suppress it.
It invades the body, pushes onto your chest, and throbs in your head. It tenses your shoulders, rings in your ears, and inflames your joints.
It stays there, invisible to your brain until an opening arises for it to take up space at the forefront of your mind once again. Or until it destroys you.
Kindy and Maral’s father died of a heart attack nine months after his son was shot.
“I think one of the reasons my dad died was the amount of pain, heartbreak and helplessness he felt that day,” Maral tells me.
We lost so much to the curfews. Some of us even more than others.
Some names in this essay have been changed at the request of those interviewed.