AN UNRELENTING BRUTALITY

MY DAUGHTER Sarah happened to share her 12th birthday this week with the 15-year-old Palestinian boy Muhammad Tamimi, who was shot in the face by an Israeli soldier last December. Muhammad, who went through his third facial surgery three weeks ago at Sandton Mediclinic, travelled to Pretoria to share with me his horrifying story.

Never did I think my daughter would be exposed to the evils of humanity so young. But while eating her birthday cake at the Jam and Daisies café, she listened to how Muhammad, who had been playing soccer with his friends, had climbed up a ladder to peer over a wall to find out why the shooting of the Israeli soldiers had suddenly fallen silent.

A soldier who was hiding on the other side of the wall shot Muhammad in the face. Muhammad fell backwards to the ground, the ladder falling on top of him, and his friends screaming and scrambling to carry him away, his face bleeding as the rubber-coated steel bullet had shattered his jaw, entered his eye socket, and was lodged in his brain. To this day, nothing has happened to that Israeli soldier.

Twenty-five minutes after the shooting, the Israeli soldier and his friend walked past the home of Muhammad’s 16-year-old cousin Ahed Tamimi. Ahed had been told that he was the soldier who had shot her cousin, which is what led to the altercation in which she slapped the soldier’s face – a scene that went viral and was played on social media. Ironically, the slap became the story, and not the shooting of Muhammad.

As Muhammad was rushed by ambulance past checkpoints to get to hospital, his father (a taxi driver) in hot pursuit of the ambulance with his son dying inside, the Israeli soldiers refused to allow him through the checkpoint. “Go back to Nabu Saleh and tell the people to stop demonstrating, and then we will let you through,” they said. He had to drive an additional 40km to take another route to get to his son. The doctors got the bullet out, but had to remove a third of his skull to allow for the swelling of the brain. For four months, the boy was at home with a hole in his skull.

Some weeks later, Muhammad was asleep in his family home, when at 3am, 30 Israeli soldiers stormed his house and forced the family out into the rain while they searched the house, destroying furniture. A scene right out of apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

They took Muhammad to a military camp, where they interrogated him, refusing to give him his seizure medication. They wanted him to sign a document saying he was injured falling off a bicycle. Muhammad never capitulated to their demands. Regardless, the Israeli military general heading the co-ordination of the army in the occupied territories claimed Muhammad’s injury was from falling off a bike, until the doctors supplied a video of them extracting the bullet from his brain, also posted on Facebook.

The intimidation continued, and in June, plain-clothes officers kidnapped Muhammad as he walked towards his family home, and beat him during interrogation to get him to confess that he was involved in stone-throwing. He was released at midnight after widespread pressure. As if that was not enough trauma, in the month of Ramadaan, Muhammad’s cousin was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers during the school holidays while his parents were at work.

This is a horrific trail of trauma, yet another generation of Palestinian youngsters is growing up knowing nothing other than brutality and repression. Cry the beloved country of Palestine, the country that is still to be born, or was born but never recognised by a world that so easily ignores what is happening right under its nose.

Ebrahim is the group foreign editor at Independent Media