Umar Was Heading to a Picnic When an Israeli Soldier Threw a Stun Grenade, Blinding Him - Twilight Zone - Haaretz.com
A 15-year-old boy wearing surgical gloves is squeezing eye drops into the wounded eyes of his 16-year-old brother. He does it several times a day. His brother’s eyes are shut; his face contorts with pain when he tries to open them. The sight in one eye has now been lost forever, and when he manages to open the other one, he can distinguish only strong light and sometimes also shadows. Umar Asi is liable to remain in this condition for life, although he may not know that yet.
Umar is lying on a colorful sofa in the living room of his home in the village of Qarawat Bani Hassan in the central West Bank, seeing nothing. Everyone who comes into the room has to introduce himself, including the many friends who gather around him throughout the day, and members of his family, who never leave him.
Umar returned home this past Monday after undergoing another emergency operation on his left eye, which is still infected and may never be able to see again properly. As for the right eye, there’s nothing more to be said: Shrapnel from a stun grenade fired by an Israel Defense Forces soldier straight into Umar’s face wreaked havoc, and the sight in that eye was irredeemably lost. Both eyes are swollen and here he is now, recuperating at home, hoping for the best. He may never see another sheep eating a flower, this little prince from Qarawat Bani Hassan.
His father Talal, 43, a math teacher in the village’s primary school, is a short man, very cordial, all smiles and brimming with optimism. He speaks West Bank Hebrew, which he learned from working in Israel, and is now devotedly caring for his son. He and his wife Wassal, 33, have five children. Umar is the eldest; Amar, who is now treating his older brother’s wounded eyes, is their second son.
Umar is in 11th grade and is an “outstanding student,” his father emphasizes. As proof, Umar asks us, in his pained and sightless state, to speak to him in English so he can demonstrate his proficiency. “So what happened to you?” we ask. “A week ago, on Monday, at 5 in the afternoon, I went to the supermarket,” Umar relates in broken English with some help from his father, shifting to a sitting position on the sofa. “There were soldiers in town,” he adds. “One of them shot a grenade into my face and both of my eyes went. And they took me to the hospital. I still have hope. I am still hoping.”
Monday, April 24, was part of the holiday of Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan, and Umar slept until midday. When he got up, the family decided to go on a picnic in the plot of land they bought a year ago, not far from their house. “We decided to go on a little outing to our land,” Talal says. The family heads out there almost every week, tends the olive, lemon, fig and avocado trees, and then barbecues meat or enjoys another meal there. They had skipped this ritual last month, because of Ramadan, so they were all delighted to be going back. One-and-a-half dunams (about a third of an acre) – the Asis’ little dream grove.
They loaded the equipment into the family’s Volkswagen Caddy and set out around 4 P.M. Umar and Amar stayed behind; Talal had asked them to buy soft drinks and pita in a local supermarket and then join the picnic afterward.
“I told Umar they should come to the land after us on the electric bike or on the horse,” Talal relates. The electric bike belongs to a cousin, the horse to Talal’s father.
The family set out happily and in good spirits, and Umar went to buy orangeade and pita with his brother. He enjoyed going out to the new grove, helping to cultivate it, enjoying the freshness of the earth and checking whether wild boars had done any damage to the trees.
After arriving, Talal realized needed help unloading the mattresses he had brought for the picnic. He tried calling his sons, to tell them to hurry. Neither answered the phone. Their father tried again, to no avail. Suddenly several local residents phoned to tell him that Umar was wounded and had been taken to the clinic in the neighboring village, Biddya.
Dropping everything, Talal drove off, only to be told that Umar had been moved to An-Najah Hospital in Nablus. “Only when I got to the hospital did I begin to realize what had happened to Umar,” he says now. “Everyone had tried to reassure me that nothing serious had happened.” Meanwhile, Wassal remained at home, accompanied by the women of the family.
Talal: “Then I heard that Umar had received a blow to the eye. They didn’t know yet what had struck him. The doctor gave him first aid and told me they would perform a small operation to reduce the pressure of the blood on the eyeball. They didn’t want to anesthetize him. But after half an hour, the doctor said they had to do a more serious operation, with anesthesia.”
At that point, when Talal saw Umar for the first time, both of his eyes were shut and bleeding. The teenager was taken to the operating room, emerging only after several hours. Before going under, however, Umar told his father that when he went to the supermarket to shop for the picnic he had run into a group of Israeli soldiers in the center of town. Local youths were throwing stones at the soldiers, who responded by firing tear-gas and stun grenades. Umar explained that he had fled to the girls’ school next to the supermarket, hiding in the yard for fear of the soldiers.
“But suddenly I couldn’t see anything,” he told Talal. “I felt that my whole face was gone, that my head was gone. I also couldn’t hear anything and I thought all my teeth were gone, too. I thought I was going to die.”
He complained of pain, and asked his father over and over, “What do I have? What happened to me?” Umar was certain that whatever it was, it had also happened to the other youths who were hiding with him in the schoolyard. That they had all lost their faces or worse, due to the soldiers’ shooting.
An investigation by Abdulkarim Sadi, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, discovered that the force had arrived in Qarawat Bani in the wake of information the army got from settler-informants about illegal construction being done in the parts of the village that are located in Area C of the West Bank, which is administered by Israel.
The settlers and Israel’s Civil Administration have been trying for some time to prevent the villagers from building there. Whenever construction equipment is spotted in the village, the Israel Defense Forces launches yet another of its daring operations, which are, of course, vital for maintaining the state’s security: confiscating a power shovel or a wheelbarrow. Let every Jewish mother know that this is what her son is doing as part of his combat service, in Qarawat Bani Hassan. Such incidents, like the one in question, are always accompanied by local residents throwing stones at the invading force, which sometimes provokes responses that result in injuries and fatalities. He that keepeth Israel doth neither slumber nor sleep.
In this case, as disturbances erupted, a rumor spread through the village that Umar had been killed, spurring even more youths to take to the streets – but by that time the young man had already lost his sight.
Earlier, the army had targeted a forbidden bulldozer, but its driver managed to hide it before the troops actually arrived, according to field researcher Sadi. The soldiers were about to leave empty-handed, but to be on the safe side, they stopped a sewage tanker and detained the driver for a time – before engaging in the requisite hot pursuit of the young people who were throwing stones at them, to punish them and teach them a lesson. For example, by firing stun grenades from a short distance.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit provided the following response this week to Haaretz: “During an operation in the village of Qarawat Bani Hassan, in [the territory of] the Ephraim Territorial Brigade, on April 24, 2023, a violent disturbance occurred in which explosive devices, stones and burning tires were hurled at an IDF unit; an officer was wounded by shrapnel from an explosive device. In response, the force employed crowd-dispersal means, and as a result one of the participants in the disturbances was hurt. If a complaint is received it will be examined in the usual way.”
Throughout the conversation, during our visit this week, Talal holds Umar’s hand and strokes it. Umar doesn’t even try to open his eyes, it’s hard to know whether he’s awake or has dozed off. His friends take pictures of the two unarmed Israelis in the living room – maybe the first unarmed Israelis they have ever seen.
On the day after the incident the physicians informed the family that the sight in Umar’s right eye was lost and that they would have to fight hard to save the left eye. The teenager was discharged, but two days later the left eye became infected and another operation was needed. A specialist in Ramallah whom they went to recommended that he be transferred to St. John Eye Hospital in East Jerusalem, but to receive a permit to enter Jerusalem would take at least two days, and the physician said the delay would endanger the remaining eye.
Umar was taken back to an-Najah where he underwent another three-hour operation. On Monday he returned home, the fate of his left eye still to be determined. Several more operations will be needed in the effort to save his vision.
“The right eye is lost, what remains is to do battle for the left eye,” Talal says, gently caressing the palm of his son’s hand.