by FAYHA SHALASH
It was a cold and rainy January night in the Palestinian town of Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem, when Hisham Taqatqa woke up to heavy knocking at 3 am.
Before the 15-year-old could alert his sleeping parents, Israeli soldiers blew the door open and broke into the house.
The scene is all too familiar to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, where night raids have long become a daily reality.
Heavily armed Israeli soldiers storm Palestinian homes in the middle of the night, vandalising their space, terrorising and assaulting residents, and subjecting them to interrogations, strip searches and detention.
That night in 2022, Israeli forces confined the seven members of the Taqatqa family to one room, then proceeded to conduct a thorough search. They smashed closets and broke furniture and household items as they spread out across the house.
“Who is Hisham?” one of the soldiers yelled. The boy raised his hand.
“When the soldiers made sure it was him, they gathered around him and tied his hands behind his back while his mother and I were screaming, asking them to let him go, but they completely ignored us,” Taqatqa’s father, Maher, told Middle East Eye.
“Then one of them pushed me back and another shouted at my wife when she tried to get a jacket for her son.”
Middle East Eye for ore