Al-Mo’taz Samara celebrates last week in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, after he was released from Israeli captivity. Photo / Hilal Samara via The Washington Post
Al-Mo’taz Samara celebrates last week in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, after he was released from Israeli captivity. Photo / Hilal Samara via The Washington Post
Al-Mo’taz Samara was reunited last week with his family after 19 months in Israeli custody.
Relatives and neighbours rushed to congratulate him when he arrived at the encampment where his family, whose home was destroyed, has been sheltering, Samara, 32, said.
Two of his brothers, Emadand Al-Mo’tasem, were missing. Samara’s heart began to sink as he saw his family whispering among themselves. Finally his mother, crying, embraced him.
“Emad and Al-Mo’tasem are gone,” she told him, saying the brothers had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on their family home in northern Gaza eight months after Samara was locked up.
Hundreds of Palestinians seized by Israel in Gaza over the last two years were sent back to the enclave under the terms of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.
The joy that accompanied the releases often gave way to anguish and rage as detainees, some reeling from abuse they suffered, learned that their children, parents or siblings had been killed while they were gone.
Samara’s dark journey during the war, which he relayed in a telephone interview to the Washington Post, bore similarities to the stories told by some of the thousands of other detainees who have returned to Gaza.
He spoke of being detained without formal charges, denied communication with his family for almost two years, and being beaten in two Israeli detention centres where he was held.
Samara’s family had only the vaguest idea he was still alive; someone told them they saw him being detained two weeks after it happened. For his part, Samara had no idea what had become of his family while he was gone.
“I hadn’t seen ordinary people for a year and seven months - only soldiers,” he said. “When I came back, everything felt strange. People looked different.”
The buses that brought the detainees home passed through the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
“It’s completely wiped out,” he said. “I haven’t been to Gaza City yet, but they say it’s totally destroyed and unliveable. What I’ve seen online breaks my heart.”
Samara, a father-of-two girls who said he worked in a school cafeteria before the war, was detained in March 2024 when Israeli troops surrounded al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
Samara said he was there helping to care for his wife’s relatives, who had been injured in an airstrike a few months earlier. That strike, which killed one of his wife’s brothers, also lightly wounded Samara, he said.
Further airstrikes targeted the area around the hospital on the day he was detained, he recalled.
Israeli soldiers surrounded the facility and “ordered everyone to surrender”, he said.
Samara and others who were detained were taken to the hospital’s outpatient department, stripped of their clothes and then given thin gowns to wear.
During subsequent video hearings, Israeli authorities accused him of belonging to a terrorist organisation, he recounted.
Samara said he wasn’t allowed to respond but in the interview this week, he said, “I don’t know why they detained me. I was a displaced civilian with no links to any armed groups. The judges never gave answers.”
Members of the International Committee of the Red Cross arrive at a site where people are digging with excavators, reportedly in search for bodies in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, on October 17. Photo / Omar Al-Qattaa, AFP
Conditions in detention
Initially, he and the others seized at the hospital were taken to Sde Teiman, a military-run detention centre in Israel’s southern desert.
Conditions there were “extremely harsh”, he said. “We were blindfolded and handcuffed all day, even while eating. We weren’t allowed to talk or move freely.”
About 120 detainees were held in a single room and shared two toilets. Samara said he was beaten in Sde Teiman and at another facility, Ofer Prison, with “sticks and soldiers’ boots.”
The Israeli military declined to comment on the reasons why Samara was detained and referred questions about the conditions of his incarceration to the Israeli Prison Service.
In response, the IPS said it had no documentation confirming it had held Samara.
In general, the IPS said: “All inmates are held according to legal procedures, and their rights including access to medical care and adequate living conditions are upheld by professionally trained staff”.
“We are not aware of the claims described, and to the best of our knowledge, no such incidents occurred under IPS responsibility.”
A 2024 report by Amnesty International found that detainees were beaten or attacked by dogs for speaking to another prisoner, forced to remain in stress positions for hours and burned with cigarette butts during interrogations.
A Human Rights Watch report the same year documented cases of rape and sexual abuse by Israeli forces, lengthy cuffing and blindfolding, and denial of medical care.
Former detainees, in interviews with the Post, have provided similar accounts.
Some of the worst abuses appear to have occurred in the Sde Teiman detention facility in the early months of the war, according to Israeli human rights groups.
In June 2024, Israeli authorities said they were moving hundreds of detainees out of the facility after rights groups challenged the legality of Sde Teiman, calling it a black hole where people disappeared into military custody. Samara said he was moved to Ofer Prison that month.
“I wasn’t allowed to contact my family during my entire detention,” he said.
He was able to meet lawyers on three occasions. During the video hearings, used to extend his detention, he wasn’t allowed to speak. “They weren’t real trials,” Samara said.
Human rights groups say the Gaza detainees were held under a provision allowing Israel to hold “unlawful combatants” that gave the authorities wide latitude to keep people indefinitely without charge.
Five months ago, Samara was moved to a new prison, where he said conditions improved.
“We had hot water, medical care and were allowed to change clothes and take breaks,” he said.
Before his release last week, he received a medical check and was interrogated by an Israeli intelligence officer.
He said the officer told him that if “we find out you’re connected to the resistance, we’ll take you again”.
“I didn’t believe I’d actually be freed until I saw Red Cross workers,” he said.
“We cried with joy and thanked God.”
Still, he was not allowed to call his family to confirm he was coming home.
When the detainees reached the Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza, the Red Cross workers told the detainees their families were waiting at Nasser Hospital in the city of Khan Younis, where they would be dropped off.
Samara was among 1700 Palestinian detainees released by Israel with 250 other Palestinians serving long terms in Israeli prisons.
The releases were part of an exchange that saw Hamas free 20 Israeli hostages that the group had held for two years in Gaza.
Soldiers of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) with tanks at the borders with Gaza, on the first day of the ceasefire implementation. Photo / Getty Images
Overwhelming needs
These former detainees now join countless other Gazans needing mental and physical care after two years of war and relentless Israeli bombardment, which has destroyed much of the health system that might provide such care.
There are orphans, parents who had lost their children, people who had struggled with starvation and displacement, the countless wounded.
“The demands are huge,” said Dr Yasser Abu-Jamei, director general of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme.
The families of the 1700 detainees will also require attention for mental health issues. While they may feel happiness at first, that will soon dissipate, he said.
“They are not returning to a healthy environment” but one where their families were still struggling for food and shelter.
Samara’s family have been living in tents in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
His reunion with his family - including his wife and two daughters - was “overwhelming”, he said. But when he found out about his brothers, he collapsed.
Al-Mo’tasem was two years older, “and we were extremely close, like twins”.
They looked alike. Emad was two years younger.
Samara has not been able to visit their graves, located in an area of Gaza still occupied by the Israelis. “When things settle, I’ll go there to pray for them and honour their memory,” he said.
When he came home, one of his daughters, Tooline, waved at him, he said. His other daughter, Masa, was only 4 months’ old when he was detained and didn’t recognise him.
“She walks and talks now, but she’s still not used to me,” Samara said.
“It was a sad and beautiful reunion - full of tears and joy.”
- Lior Soroka and Hazem Balousha contributed to this report.
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