By Claire Parker and Hazem Balousha, The Washington PostIsraeli soldiers handle a blindfolded Palestinian detainee from Gaza after arriving to the Israeli side of the border on Wednesday. The detainee's hands were tied behind his back with a plastic zip tie.
“There is no obligation to provide this information,” Ran Rosenberg, a lawyer for the state, said at the hearing Wednesday. He cited an earlier ruling by a high court justice saying the state considers Gaza “enemy territory” and has no duty to alert the families of detainees to their whereabouts. “Individuals suspected of involvement in terrorist activity are being detained and questioned,” the IDF spokesperson’s unit said in a statement. “Individuals who are found not to be taking part in terrorist activities are released.”
The group began filing petitions for individual detainees, including the subject of Wednesday’s hearing, a 43-year-old X-ray technician named Muhammad Hamid Salem Abu Musa. A high court judge last month ordered the IDF, the head of Israel’s prison service, its chief military prosecutor and others to respond to HaMoked’s petition.
The IDF said it stormed the medical complex to recover the bodies of hostages it believed were being held there - and to stop what it said was militant activity in and around hospital grounds. Israeli forces did not find any hostages’ bodies in the raid, but said they discovered boxes of medicine bearing the names of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas.
Still, the family’s fears deepened when civil defense workers in Gaza discovered several mass graves at the Nasser Hospital complex in the weeks after the raid. Some of the graves contained bodies buried there before the operation.