how RAMALLAH, May 4 (JMCC) - The daughter of Palestinian author Ahmad Qatamish, Hanin, was visiting from Cairo when Israeli soldiers broke into their home to arrest him.
Qatamish on Wednesday was ordered detained for six months without charge.
In this
haunting account published at the Electronic Intifada, Hanin Qatamish recalls her father's years of detention when she was a child, and how he taught her never to abandon her dreams.
Last Wednesday night, just past midnight, my mother and I were chatting when we suddenly heard pounding on the door and someone shouting in chillingly familiar broken Arabic, “iftakh bab!” (open the door). We looked carefully from behind the slit-open curtain to realize that many Israeli occupation soldiers were surrounding the house, heavily armed and in combat formation. Shortly afterwards, they broke in and occupied the house.
They pointed their machine guns at us and told us they wanted to search the house. My 14-year-old cousin, Nai, and 69-year-old aunt were sleeping inside. Without thinking, I rushed to my room to alert Nai so that she would not wake up with a gun pointed at her face. That was the most haunting experience in my own traumatic childhood, when Israeli forces arrested my father many years earlier.