The initiation

ON THE second day of the Israeli invasion into Ramallah, Iptisam Anwar watched her 18-year-old son Fadi being led away by Israeli soldiers through the crack in the yellow- curtained kitchen window.



“I was crying but I couldn’t say anything,” remembers the spirited woman, her face framed in black cloth, “I was afraid they would find my eldest son and husband, who were here.” Fadi was staying with his friends and an uncle in the adjoining apartment and when the soldiers came, they came first to the door near the mosque.

Outside the Anwar home in Ramallah’s Old City sits the detritus of war - police cars with their windows shot out, a flashy red convertible smashed under the treads of a tank, garbage piled and scattered in the streets.

But the unseen remnants remain lodged in these young men - Fadi, Jilal, 21, and Jihad, 19. Fadi’s father says he told him a lot about the five years he spent in Israeli jail. Now Fadi has stories of his own.

The childhood friends were first taken by soldiers to the empty home of a neighbor, where they were strip searched, blindfolded and their hands tied with wide plastic thread. “They tied our hands so hard that that itself was a lesson,” remembers Fadi.

From five in the morning to some time that afternoon, the young men were left there on the floor, the smell of human waste around them. “One soldier came and we told him that we would like to smoke,” says Jihad. “He gave us cigarettes and a piece of chocolate that we split. We were hungry.” A few minutes later, another soldier came in. When he saw the cigarettes, he started to hit the boys. Jihad was struck with a plastic stool in the back of his skull.

“My hands were tied,” says the lanky teen, headphones hanging around his neck. “What could I do?” It was the worst of many such blows in their ten days of the young men’s detention by the Israeli military.