Son of Hamas

Chapter Thirteen TRUST NO ONE 1996

After being held underground for so long, it was wonderful to see the sky. It seemed as though I hadn’t seen the stars for years. They were beautiful, despite the huge camp lights that dimmed their brightness. But stars meant it was time to head to our tents to prepare for head count and bed. And that was when things got really confusing for me.

My number was 823, and prisoners were billeted in numerical order. That meant I should have been placed in the Hamas tent in Quadrant Three. But that tent was full, so I had been assigned to the corner tent in Quadrant One.

When it came time for head count, however, I still had to stand in the appropriate place in Quadrant Three. That way, when the guard went down his list, he wouldn’t have to remember all the housekeeping adjustments that had been made to keep things tidy.

Every movement of the head count was choreographed.

Twenty-five soldiers, M16s at the ready, entered Quadrant One and then moved from tent to tent. We all stood facing the canvas, our backs to the troops. Nobody dared move for fear of being shot.

When they had finished there, the soldiers moved into Quadrant Two. After that, they closed both gates in the fence, so that no one from One or Two could slip into Three or Four to cover for a missing prisoner.

On my first night in Section Five, I noticed that a mysterious kind of shell game was taking place. When I first took my place in Three, a very sickly looking prisoner stood next to me. He looked horrible, almost as if he was about to die. His head was shaved; he was clearly exhausted. He never made eye contact. Who is this guy, and what happened to him? I wondered.

When the soldiers finished the head count in One and moved on to Two, somebody grabbed the guy, dragged him out of the tent, and another prisoner took his place next to me. I learned later that a small opening had been cut in the fence between One and Three so they could swap the prisoner with someone else.

Obviously, nobody wanted the soldiers to see the bald guy. But why?

That night, lying in my bed, I heard somebody moaning in the distance, somebody who was clearly in a lot of pain. It didn’t last long, however, and I quickly drifted off to sleep.

Morning always came too quickly, and before I knew it, we were being awakened for predawn prayer. Of the 240 prisoners in Section Five, 140 guys got up and stood in line to use the six toilets—actually six holes with privacy barriers over a common pit. Eight basins for wudu. Thirty minutes.

Then we lined up in rows for prayer. The daily routine was pretty much the same as it had been in the mi’var. But now there were twelve times as many prisoners. And yet I was struck by how smoothly everything went, even with that many people. No one ever seemed to make a mistake. It was almost eerie.

Everybody seemed to be terrified. No one dared break a rule. No one dared stay a little too long at the toilet. No one dared make eye contact with a prisoner under investigation or with an Israeli soldier. No one ever stood too close to the fence.

It didn’t take long, though, before I began to understand. Flying under the radar of the prison authorities, Hamas was running its own show, and they were keeping score. Break a rule, and you got a red point. Collect enough red points, and you answered to the maj’d, the Hamas security wing—tough guys who didn’t smile and didn’t make jokes.

Most of the time, we didn’t even see the maj’d because they were busy collecting intelligence. The message balls thrown from one section to another were from them and for them.

One day, I was sitting on my bed when the maj’d came in and shouted, “Everybody evacuate this tent!” Nobody said a word. The tent was empty in seconds. They took a man inside the now-empty tent, closed the flap, and posted two guards. Somebody turned on the TV. Loud. Other guys started to sing and make noises.

I didn’t know what was going on inside the tent, but I had never heard a human being scream like that guy did. What could he have done to deserve that? I wondered. The torture went on for about thirty minutes. Then two maj’d brought him out and took him to another tent, where the interrogation began again.

I had been talking to a friend named Akel Sorour, who was from a village close to Ramallah, when we were evacuated.

“What’s going on in that tent?” I asked.

“Oh, he is a bad guy,” he said simply.

“I know he is a bad guy, but what are they doing to him? And what has he done?”

“He didn’t do anything in prison,” Akel explained. “But they say when he was in Hebron he gave the Israelis information about a Hamas member, and it sounded like he was talking a lot. So they torture him from time to time.”

“How?”

“They usually put needles under his fingernails and melt plastic food trays onto his bare skin. Or they burn off his body hair. Sometimes they put a big stick behind his knees, force him to sit on his ankles for hours, and don’t let him sleep.”

Now I understood why everyone was so careful to toe the line and what had happened to the bald man I saw when I first arrived. The maj’d hated collaborators, and until we could prove otherwise, we were all suspected of being collaborators, spies for the Israelis.

Because Israel had been so successful in identifying Hamas cells and imprisoning its members, the maj’d assumed that the organization must be riddled with spies, and they were determined to expose them. They watched every move we made. They watched our manners and listened to everything we said. And they tallied up the points. We knew who they were, but we didn’t know who their spies were. Somebody I thought was a friend could work with the maj’d, and I could find myself being investigated tomorrow.

I decided my best bet was to keep to myself as much as I could and be very careful whom I trusted. Once I understood the atmosphere of suspicion and treachery in the camp, my life changed dramatically. I felt as though I was in an entirely different prison—one in which I could not move freely, talk freely, trust or relate or befriend. I was afraid to make a mistake, be late, sleep through wake-up calls, or nod off during jalsa.

If someone was “convicted” by the maj’d of being a collaborator, his life was over. His family’s life was over. His kids, his wife, everyone abandoned him. Being known as a collaborator was the worst reputation anyone could have. Between 1993 and 1996, more than 150 suspected collaborators were investigated by Hamas inside Israeli prisons. About sixteen were murdered.

Because I could write very fast and neatly, the maj’d asked if I would be their clerk. The information I would handle was top secret, they said. And they warned me to keep it to myself.

I spent my days copying dossiers on prisoners. We were very careful to keep this information out of reach of the prison officials. We never used names, just code numbers. Written on the thinnest paper available, the files read like the worst kind of pornography. Guys confessed to having had sex with their mothers. One said he had had sex with a cow. Another had had sex with his daughter. Yet another had had sex with his neighbor, filmed it with a spy camera, and given the photographs to the Israelis. The Israelis, the report said, showed the pictures to the neighbor and threatened to send them to her family if she refused to work with their spy. So they kept having sex together and collecting information and having sex with others and filming it, until the entire village seemed to be working for the Israelis. And this was just the first file I was asked to copy.

It seemed crazy to me. As I continued to copy the files, I realized that suspects under torture were being asked things they couldn’t possibly know about and giving answers they thought their torturers wanted to hear. It seemed obvious that they would say anything just to make the torture stop. I also suspected that some of these bizarre interrogations served no purpose other than to feed the sexual fantasies of the imprisoned maj’d.

Then one day, my friend Akel Sorour became one of their victims. He was a member of a Hamas cell and had been arrested many times, but for some reason he was never accepted by the urban Hamas prisoners. Akel was a simple farmer. The way he spoke and ate seemed funny to the others, and they took advantage of him. He tried his best to gain their trust and respect by cooking and cleaning for them, but they treated him like trash because they knew he served them out of fear.

And Akel had reason to be afraid. His parents were dead. His sister was the only family he had left. This made him extremely vulnerable because there was no one to take revenge for his torture. In addition, a friend from his cell had been interrogated by the maj’d and mentioned Akel’s name under torture. I felt very sorry for him. But how could I help him? I was just a confused kid with no authority. I knew that the only reason I was immune from the same treatment was because of my father.

Once a month, our families were permitted to visit us. The Israeli prison cuisine left a lot to be desired, so they usually brought us homemade food and personal items. Because Akel and I were from the same area, our families came on the same day.

After a long application process, the Red Cross gathered family members from a particular area and loaded them onto buses. It was only a two-hour drive to Megiddo. But because the buses had to stop at every checkpoint and all the passengers had to be searched at every stop, our families had to leave the house at four in the morning in order to reach the prison by noon.

One day, after a pleasant visit with his sister, Akel returned to Section Five with the bags of food she had brought him. He was happy and had no idea what awaited him. My uncle Ibrahim had come to lecture, which was always a bad sign. I had learned that Ibrahim often gathered everyone together and preached to provide cover for the maj’d when they took someone to interrogation. This time, the “someone” was Akel. The maj’d took away his gifts and led him into a tent. He disappeared behind a curtain, where his worst nightmare began.

I looked at my uncle. Why didn’t he stop them? He had been in prison with Akel many times. They had suffered together. Akel had cooked for him and taken care of him. My uncle knew this man. Was it because Akel was a poor, quiet farmer from the village and my uncle was from the city?

Whatever the reasons, Ibrahim Abu Salem sat with the maj’d, laughing and eating the food Akel’s sister had brought for her imprisoned brother. Nearby, fellow Hamas members—fellow Arabs, fellow Palestinians, fellow Muslims—shoved needles under Akel’s fingernails.

I saw Akel only a few times over the next few weeks. His head and beard had been shaved, his eyes were glued to the ground. He was skinny and looked like an old man at death’s door.

Later, I was given his file to copy. He had confessed to having sex with every woman in his village as well as with donkeys and other animals. I knew that every word was a lie, but I copied the file, and the maj’d sent it to his village. His sister disowned him. His neighbors shunned him.

To me, the maj’d were far worse than any collaborator. But they were also powerful and influential within the inner workings of the prison system. I thought I might be able to use them to reach my own objectives.

Anas Rasras was a maj’d leader. His father was a college professor in the West Bank and a close friend of my uncle Ibrahim. After I arrived at Megiddo, my uncle had asked Anas to help me get adjusted and learn the ropes. Anas was from Hebron, about forty years old, very secretive, very intelligent, and very dangerous. He was under the eyes of the Shin Bet every moment he was out of prison. He had few friends, but he never participated in torture. Because of this, I grew to respect and even trust him.

I told him about how I had agreed to collaborate with the Israelis so that I could become a double agent, obtain high-level weaponry, and kill them from the inside. I asked if he could help me.

“I have to check this out,” he said. “I won’t tell anybody, but I will see.”

“What do you mean you will see? Can you help me or not?”

I should have known better than to trust this man. Instead of trying to help me, he immediately told my uncle Ibrahim and some of the other members of the maj’d about my plan.

The next morning, my uncle came to see me.

“What do you think you are doing?”

“Don’t freak out. Nothing happened. I have a plan. You don’t have to be part of it.”

“This is very dangerous, Mosab, for your reputation and your father’s, for your entire family’s. Other people do things like this, not you.”

He began to question me. Did the Shin Bet give me a contact inside the prison? Did I meet this particular Israeli guy or that security guy? What was I told? What did I tell others? The more he interrogated me, the angrier I became. Finally, I just blew up in his face.

“Why don’t you stick to your religious stuff and leave security alone! All these guys are torturing people for nothing. They have no idea what they’re doing. Look, I have nothing else to say. I am going to do what I want, and you do what you want.”

I knew that things didn’t look good for me. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t torture or interrogate me because of my father, but I could tell that my uncle Ibrahim didn’t know if I was telling the truth or not.

At that point, I wasn’t sure either.

I recognized that I had been foolish to trust the maj’d. Had I been just as foolish to trust the Israelis? They still hadn’t told me anything. They had given me no contacts. Were they playing a game with me?

I went to my tent and felt myself beginning to shut down mentally and emotionally. I no longer trusted anyone. Other prisoners saw that something was wrong with me, but they didn’t know what it was. Though the maj’d kept what I told them to themselves, they never took their eyes off of me. Everyone was suspicious of me. Likewise, I suspected everyone. And we all lived together in an open-air cage with no place else to go. No place to get away or hide.

Time dragged on. Suspicion grew. Every day, there was screaming; every night, torture. Hamas was torturing its own people! As much as I wanted to, I simply could not find a way to justify that.

Soon it got even worse. Instead of one person, three would be under investigation at the same time. One morning at four o’clock, a guy ran through the section, scrambled up and over the perimeter fence, and in twenty seconds was outside the camp, his clothes and his flesh shredded by the razor wire. An Israeli tower guard swung his machine gun around and took aim.

“Don’t shoot!” the guy screamed. “Don’t shoot! I’m not trying to escape. I’m trying to get away from them!” And he pointed to the panting maj’d who glared out at him through the fence. Soldiers ran out the gate, threw the inmate to the ground, searched him, and took him away.

Was this Hamas? Was this Islam?