麻豆传媒

What happened when you were arrested?

They blindfolded me and put me in what I presume was a military jeep. They sat me on the floor. There were two female Israeli soldiers with me. They were stamping on me and cursing at me. They shouted at me and encouraged me to curse President Arafat, trying to provoke me. When we got to the prison they took me out of the jeep with the blindfold still on. They took it off only when I was inside. I had no idea where I was. I went straight to solitary confinement.

What was your cell like?

It was about the size of a mattress, with a hole for the toilet. There was no food or water. It had no window, just a small square hole in the ceiling. I used to know whether it was day or night through this. There was a red night light always on.

Where did they interrogate you?

They would come and fetch me from this cell and take me to a special interrogation cell. There was a desk, and chairs. He sat behind the desk. It was just a small room.

Could you describe the first time you met your interrogator?

He introduced himself. He said, I am Captain Koubi. I knew who he was. He was in charge of special services in the Ramallah area, where my village is. I knew he was special services, and that he had interrogated people in our village. So I assumed we were in Ramallah. He never told me I was in Jerusalem.

What did he say to you?

He asked me what my name was. Then he started telling me about people in my village. He drew a map of the town. He pointed to places on the map and said, this is so-and-so鈥檚 house, this is someone else鈥檚 house, this is the mayor鈥檚 house. He made me feel he knew everything about the village. He said, don鈥檛 hide anything, I know everything.

What did he want from you?

He wanted to know why I took the pictures, whom I took them for, who told me to take them out of the country. I was known in town for being very patriotic, though I was not in any faction.

We had a person living in our village who was in charge of the local faction of Yasser Arafat鈥檚 Fatah movement. The Israelis hated him. People respected him, he had a very good reputation in the village. He was very old. Koubi told me that they had taken this man and were holding him. He showed me the map and pointed out where he lived.

He wanted to see if I had any kind of relationship with this man. He thought that maybe he had told me to take the pictures and carry them across the border. I said I respected and valued this leader but that I did not know him personally. I don鈥檛 think I ever spoke to him directly.

How did Koubi question you?

When the Israelis interrogate you, they try to scare you. They try to overwhelm you. It works with some people because they have weak personalities. He asked me the same questions over and over. He wanted me to admit to something I hadn鈥檛 done. He wanted information from me. He told me that he was going to make me start talking to myself.

Could you give me an example of the techniques he used?

The pictures they found on me when I was arrested were partly of my brother and my mother. Captain Koubi would bring in the pictures and show them to me and he鈥檇 say, take a good look at this picture of your mother. This is the last you are going to see of her. You are never going to see her again.

He was intelligent. He knew my father had died and that I was the only child in my family living with my mother, that the others were abroad. He knew how close my mother and I were. He was using this against me. He told me he was frightening my mother. He said, we have brought your mother, we have her in jail, and she is falling apart. He said, I don鈥檛 know what you鈥檙e doing to her, how can you upset her like this? It should be OK for someone to make 100 people cry, but you should never make your mother cry. He told me they went to her house and tore it up, and that my mother was there, and when they told her I was in prison she had fallen to the floor.

He was lying, of course, and I didn鈥檛 believe him. He said she had said things, expressions that I knew she didn鈥檛 know because she was a villager. Because of that I knew he was lying.

At this point Fadya stops, puts her hand to her face and shuts her eyes. She is quiet, and then she leaves the room and is comforted by a relative who has been sitting with her through the interview. After a while they return. She says she has recovered and wants to carry on. She never says what it was about the interrogation that is affecting her so profoundly, but it is clear that recalling it is causing her distress.

How did Koubi behave towards you?

The first time he interrogated me he was friendly. After that he became tougher. Once he hit me. You cannot really call it a beating, it was just a slap to my face. He would do other things. He would sit in a chair across the desk from me and put his feet up on the desk. The soles of his feet would be in my face so that I felt humiliated. His techniques were more psychological than physical.

He always started the sessions nicely, then slowly as I became more stubborn he became more nervous and tense. He would get angry. I remember once he smoked an entire packet of cigarettes.

He did other things. Once he told me to go into the interrogation room, and he left me waiting there for three or four hours. No one came. Throughout this time I was afraid to move. I had heard about how they abuse women in jail or take abusive pictures of them. I sat with my arms and legs crossed for fear I was being filmed.

Were you frightened during all this?

I gave him no emotion. I wasn鈥檛 afraid to begin with. If you show you are afraid they take you over. I became stronger. I acted as if an animal was sitting across from me. I didn鈥檛 believe he was a human being. I said to myself, if you have the mental strength to come through this you鈥檒l see these people are nothing. They are just liars.

鈥淚 said to myself, if you have the mental strength to come through this you will see these people are nothing鈥�

They think that when they do these things to you they are going to make you afraid or stop loving your country. On the contrary, in jail you learn more things. I always had strong patriotic feelings, I used to hide boys in my house who were in trouble with the Israelis. After my time in jail those feelings were even stronger.

What did you think would happen to you?

They told me they were not going to send me back to my town. I thought, whatever will happen will happen. If I鈥檓 going to stay in prison so be it.

How do you think the Israelis knew so much about you?

I later discovered that Koubi had gone to the mayor in my village and asked him about me. The mayor had no idea I was in prison. He thought I was abroad. Koubi asked him what he knew about me and what I did in the village. He replied, this girl lost her father very young, she lives alone with her mother, she is a pre-school teacher. She is a very good girl and very well respected and honourable. Then Koubi told him, no, she is very strong-willed.

What happened when you were released?

The day before I was released Koubi was threatening me, telling me again that I was going to start talking to myself, telling me he was going to put me in a room full of men. He started insulting my honour. So I had no idea I was going to be let out.

The next morning they released me from my cell into a waiting area. There were two other women in the waiting area. It was strange, because during the time in solitary confinement I did not cry once, but when I saw those two women I just broke down and started crying. The older woman said, let her cry, she needs to cry. I was assuming at that stage that the Israelis were sending me to administrative detention. I still didn鈥檛 know I was going to be released. I asked the women where I was. They said I was in the Moskobiyya detention centre in Jerusalem. I had no idea I was in Jerusalem. I was relieved. I thanked God that I was in Jerusalem.

What was it like when you got home?

When I was released it was the middle of the night and I had to find my way through west Jerusalem, which I didn鈥檛 know, back to Ramallah and my village. I eventually found a taxi driver in east Jerusalem who offered to take me to stay with his wife in Ramallah because it was so late. I refused because I was thinking about what Captain Koubi had said about him going to my mother鈥檚 house and tearing it up and hurting my mother. I needed to see that everything was OK.

How was your mother?

She was fine. She had been told only that day that I had been detained. She had thought I was abroad visiting my brother. I knew then that Koubi had been telling me lies about tearing up the house and hurting my mother.

I crawled into the bed next to her. I was hugging and kissing her. My mother said she was worried about my reputation. She was worried that people in the community would be talking about how I had been in jail. There was a big social stigma about women being in jail.

How did the whole experience affect you?

All my efforts were concentrated on trying to forget about it. At the time it was socially very difficult. I didn鈥檛 tell anybody, I didn鈥檛 talk about it. Nobody knew what really happened to me. I tried very hard to forget.

Did you manage to forget?

I managed to put it in the past. But recently I began talking to psychologists from the Treatment and Rehabilitation Centre for Victims of Torture in Ramallah and it all started coming back. It鈥檚 only recently I have been able to talk about it. My children have only just learned that I was in jail. It is very exhausting for me to talk about it.

Do you feel it is something you still need to resolve?

O

Again Fadya stops for a moment and puts her hand to her head. She does not answer the question, but she indicates she wants to carry on.

What would you say to Koubi if you saw him again?

I鈥檇 probably spit on him. I have no respect for him, I hate him. He looks like a nice man, he is quite good-looking. He even carried a Palestinian key ring. But look at what he said about my mother being in the next room. He is a liar.