It was one of the most horrible sights I’d encountered under the Israeli occupation. On the floor of a dim cave lay a good-looking young man, his very thin legs raised on a plastic chair, a phlegm drainage tube pipe stuck in his neck, his head wrapped in a towel, his eyes closed, a diaper on his loins. His father stood over him wiping the sweat from his face, his mother sat in the corner of the cave, her face said it all. He lay like that without moving, with no bed, no electricity and no running water – for two years. Two years and 43 days, to be precise.
At 10 o’clock on Tuesday morning Harun Abu Aram died. Since I saw him in the summer, one of his legs had been amputated. Now the doctors were about to amputate the second one. He died in hospital in Hebron from an infection that had spread in his body due to the bedsores caused by lying on the cave floor for two years, and from other complications. In the last two weeks of his wretched life he was hospitalized in Hebron, until he died this week.
When we visited him in the cave in the summer, Alex Levac and I, he pretended to be sleeping. When he finally opened his eyes, he only asked us to get out. A year and a half earlier, on January 1, 2021, he had his 23rd birthday. On that day his life ended. An Israeli soldier shot him in the neck at point blank range and rendered him paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his short life. That was after Harun had attempted to save the neighbors’ generator, which the soldier was about to confiscate by force
Without the generator there’s no life in the shepherd community Khirbet al-Rakiz in the south of Mount Hebron. Harun tried to pull the generator from the soldier’s hands and the soldier shot him. The IDF would later claim the soldier felt his life was at risk. An armed soldier felt his life was threatened by an unarmed shepherd, who wanted nothing but to save the neighbors’ generator – that according to the behavior code of IDF soldiers.
According to that same army’s ethical code, the soldier was never tried for anything. The investigation was closed, the soldier continued with his life as though nothing bad had happened.
The minimum punishment he should have been given was to be forced to visit his victim. To look straight at his victim and see what he did to him. But Harun was thrown and abandoned on the floor of the cave where his parents live. About a year before he was wounded the family’s house had been torn down by the Civil Administration.
In the two years since then the Civil Administration did not permit the family to build an access road to enable Harun to be moved, or to build a room where he could live in slightly more humane conditions. That was before the terror of the Zionist left, Bezalel Smotrich, was appointed minister in charge of the Civil Administration.
After Harun was wounded, the authorities also revoked his father’s work permit – for road building in Israel – out of fear that he might seek revenge, and the family was left with no breadwinner. But this wasn’t the end of their suffering. Israel refused to recognize Harun’s injury and to finance his medical and nursing care, claiming the state had no “responsibility for the damage.” No responsibility for the damage, no responsibility for anything, no guilt and no reparation. Looking for the face of Israeli evil? Its victim was thrown in a cave in Khirbet A-Rakiz for two years.
Harun’s story generated no interest in Israel – with the exception of Physicians for Human Rights, which collected donations to hospitalize him in Israel for a few months, and a wonderful group of Israeli volunteers who enlisted to help the family. They kept doing so with endless devotion until his last moments.
Yesterday Arela of Kibbutz Shoval wrote in Facebook that she was about to visit him in hospital on Tuesday, but when she called his father to coordinate the visit, she was told of his death.
“Mother Farsi and father Rasmi, his brothers and sisters, all devoted their lives to him and lost him today. I lost him too, we lost him. He was like a son to us.” Harun died in terrible agony, he used to cry at night and during the day he’d close his eyes and pretend to be sleeping. Israel also closed its eyes. What a disgrace.