Balata, West Bank:

Newly freed from an Israeli prison, Wael Masha rode atop friends’ shoulders through the streets of his West Bank refugee camp before bursting into his home to kiss his mother’s feet.

Less than a year later, those friends carried the 18-year-old’s body through the same streets after Israeli forces killed him in an air strike, describing him as an armed militant who posed a threat to Israeli forces.

His journey was not unique: Masha is one of at least three Palestinians born in the Israeli-occupied West Bank who were arrested as teenagers, released during a brief truce in the Gaza war last November, then killed in intensifying Israeli military operations in the territory.

Israel says its raids and air strikes in the West Bank, which it has occupied since 1967, reflect the scope of the security threat it faces from Palestinian combatants.

His family and others like them say Israel is fuelling the problem it claims to be fighting, arresting young men — Masha was 17 when he was taken into custody — then abusing them in custody, ultimately driving them to seek revenge.

What is not in dispute is that Masha embraced “jihad” after his release, and knew where it would lead.

In his will, he instructed his mother: “When you hear the news of my martyrdom, God willing, do not cry, but ululate.”

While some memorial posters show Masha brandishing an automatic weapon, his mother remembers him differently.

“He loved studying and repairing computers and mobile phones,” Hanadi Masha told AFP in the family home in Balata refugee camp, east of Nablus, surrounded by pictures of her smiling son.

Perhaps this interest could have turned into a career, she added.

But “after he got out of prison, he had a grudge because of everything he saw inside”.

‘SHOCK’ BEHIND BARS

The fallout from the nearly year-old war in Gaza has reverberated across the West Bank, where the health ministry says at least 680 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers since Hamas’s October 7 attack.

Israeli officials say 24 Israelis, including troops, have been killed in Palestinian attacks during the same period.

Even before the war, Israeli round-ups of Palestinian men were common, including the one in November 2022 in which Masha was detained.

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club advocacy group says there are at least 250 Palestinians under the age of 18 currently in Israeli custody.

“The occupation does not hesitate to arrest children under 18 years old… The widespread arrests have nothing to do with any armed action,” said Hilmi al-Araj of the Palestinian civil society group Hurryyat.

Israeli authorities took Masha to Megiddo prison in northern Israel and sentenced him to two and a half years on charges they never disclosed to his family.

His surprise release came during a weeklong truce in Gaza in November 2023, the only one of the war so far, during which Palestinian militants released 105 hostages seized on October 7, the Israelis among them in exchange for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

Once out, Masha recounted a host of abuses: being instructed to kiss the Israeli flag, being burned with cigarette butts.

His father Bilal said the experience was “a huge shock” that “changed things completely” for him.

“My son entered as a cub and came out as a lion,” he said.

‘PRIME OF LIFE’

Israel has not explained the precise circumstances of Masha’s death, and his parents say they do not know what he was doing when an Israeli strike killed him on August 15.

They only know that the day before the strike Masha said he received a threatening phone call from an Israeli officer warning: “It’s your turn.”

The details are clearer for Tariq Daoud, a second Palestinian teenager who was detained with Masha and released on the same day of the November truce.

Like Masha, Daoud said he was beaten at Megiddo prison, his brother Khaled told AFP at the family home in Qalqilyah, where children wear necklaces featuring his face.

Khaled said the abuse produced false confessions from Tariq — aged 16 when he was arrested — on charges including possessing an illegal firearm and attempting to build explosives.

Incarceration “shattered all his ambitions”, which had included potentially becoming an engineer or a doctor, Khaled said.

Instead he joined Hamas’s armed wing.

In the same week that Masha was killed, Tariq opened fire on an Israeli settler in Azzun, east of Qalqilyah, and Israeli troops shot him dead at the scene, both Khaled and the Israeli military said.

Israeli officials have not yet released his body, but Khaled still visits his plot at the Qalqilyah cemetery every day to water the flowers.

“I go because I feel that there is something of his presence,” Khaled said.

Back in the Balata camp, Masha’s mother Hanadi has found her own ways to honour her son, talking about him with his four younger siblings and stroking pictures of his beard — just like she playfully greeted him when he was alive.

Shortly after Masha’s death, the institute where he had been taking classes told her he had been awarded certificates in mobile phone repair and cybersecurity.

His mother attended the graduation ceremony on his behalf.

“He was a young man in the prime of life,” she told AFP through tears.

His time behind bars “planted the idea of resistance in his head.”
 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

The Palestinian group Hamas said on Friday efforts to agree to a ceasefire for the Gaza Strip were back at square one after Israel effectively rejected a proposal by international mediators.

Hamas said in a statement it would hold consultations with Palestinian factions to review its strategy for negotiations on halting seven months of war, triggered by its deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

The United Nations warned hours earlier that aid for Gaza could grind to a halt in days after Israel seized control this week of the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, a vital route for supplies to the devastated Palestinian enclave.

Despite fierce US pressure, Israel has said it will go ahead with an assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than 1 million displaced people have sought refuge and Israeli forces say Hamas militants are hiding.

Israeli tanks captured the main road dividing the eastern and western sections of Rafah on Friday, effectively encircling the eastern part of the city in an assault that has caused Washington to block some military aid to its ally.

Indirect diplomacy has failed to end a war that health authorities in Hamas-run Gaza say has killed almost 35,000 people since the Oct. 7 attack. Some 1,200 people were killed in Israel and 253 taken hostage on Oct. 7, according to Israeli tallies.

Ceasefire talks in Cairo broke up on Thursday with no agreement to halt the fighting and release hostages.

Hamas had said it agreed at the start of the week to a proposal submitted by Qatari and Egyptian mediators that had previously been accepted by Israel. Israel said the Hamas proposal contained elements it cannot accept.

“Israel’s rejection of the mediators’ proposal through the amendments it made returned things to the first square,” Hamas said in Friday’s statement.

“In the light of Netanyahu’s behaviour and rejection of the mediators’ document and the attack on Rafah and the occupation of the crossing, the leadership of the movement will hold consultations with the brotherly leaders of the Palestinian factions to review our negotiation strategy.”

Explosions And Gunfire

Residents described almost constant explosions and gunfire east and northeast of Rafah on Friday, with intense fighting between Israeli forces and militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Hamas said it ambushed Israeli tanks near a mosque in the east of the city, a sign the Israelis had penetrated several kilometres from the east to the outskirts of the built-up area.

Israel has ordered civilians out of the eastern part of Rafah, forcing tens of thousands of people to seek shelter outside the city, previously the last refuge of more than a million who fled other parts of the enclave during the war.

Israel says it cannot win the war without assaulting Rafah to root out thousands of Hamas fighters it believes are sheltering there. Hamas says it will fight to defend it.

Supplies were already running short and aid operations could halt within days as fuel and food stocks get used up, United Nations aid agencies said.

“For five days, no fuel and virtually no humanitarian aid entered the Gaza Strip, and we are scraping the bottom of the barrel,” said the UNICEF Senior Emergency Coordinator in the Gaza Strip, Hamish Young.

Aid agencies say the battle has put hundreds of thousands of already displaced civilians in harm’s way.

“It is not safe, all of Rafah isn’t safe, as tank shells landed everywhere since yesterday,” Abu Hassan, 50, a resident of Tel al-Sultan west of Rafah told Reuters via a chat app.

“I am trying to leave but I can’t afford 2,000 shekels ($540) to buy a tent for my family,” he said. “There is an increased movement of people out of Rafah even from the western areas, though they were not designated as red zones by the occupation.”

Israeli tanks have already sealed off eastern Rafah from the south, capturing and shutting the only crossing between the enclave and Egypt. An advance on Friday to the Salahuddin road that bisects the Gaza Strip completed the encirclement of the “red zone” where they have ordered residents out.

The Israeli military said its forces in eastern Rafah had located several tunnel shafts, and troops backed by an air strike fought at close quarters with groups of Hamas fighters, killing several. It said Israeli jets had hit several sites from which rockets and mortar bombs had been fired towards Israel in recent days.

The prospect of a full assault on Rafah has opened up one of the biggest rifts for generations between Israel and its closest ally the United States, which has blocked shipments of weapons to Israel for the first time since the war began.

Netanyahu said on Thursday Israel would “fight with our fingernails” if it must, and he hoped disagreements with President Joe Biden would be resolved.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)