A man shows his wrists, which still have cut marks, marks of beatings and restraints, he says.
Ramadan al-Issaoui claims that he spent “23 days in Ofer”, an Israeli prison in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel for more than 50 years.
“I was in a detention center with hundreds of detainees,” he told AFP, his voice shaking. “We told ourselves that we could die at any moment. They gave us just enough food and drink to survive, we knew nothing about the outside world.”
A terror movie”
“Psychologically, we are destroyed: we don’t know if our families are alive or dead and if we had at least been here in the war, we could have died along with our children,” he says, his voice breaking and his forehead drenched in sweat.
As he enters the devastated Gaza Strip to reunite with his family, whom he has not seen for weeks, Sabri Fayez claims that he has just walked out of a “horror movie.”
“It was an endless horror movie that was constantly repeated: intelligence, interrogations, dogs unleashed on us, machine guns, even though we are just workers, we only care about earning a living,” he says, gesturing with his hands.
“Every minute we prayed to die and for this to end,” says the man, visibly exhausted.
More men arrive after him, under the same conditions. And in front, some are perched on a horse-drawn cart, which gradually enters the Gaza Strip, where the sound of explosions is incessant.
With information from AFP and Reuters