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DEIR AL-BALAH: Amid the joy of being released after 20 months of suffering in Israeli prisons, Mohammed Abu Moussa could tell something was wrong.
Descending from the bus that brought him and other released Palestinian detainees to Gaza last week, the 45-year-old medical technician was reunited with his wife and two young children. But when he asked about his mother, his brother wouldn’t look him the eye.
Finally they sat him down and told him: His mother, his younger sister Aya, Aya’s children and his aunt and uncle had all been killed by an Israeli airstrike that hit their shelter in central Gaza in July.
More than 1,800 Palestinians seized from Gaza by Israeli troops during the two-year war were freed this week under the ceasefire deal that brought Hamas’ release of the last living hostages. Israel also freed around 250 Palestinian prisoners convicted over the past decades, who mainly returned to the occupied West Bank or were exiled abroad, though a few were sent to Gaza.
Those released back to Gaza were met by the shock of how their homeland had been destroyed and families shattered by Israeli bombardment and offensives while they were locked away, with little news of the war.
Recounting his return, Abou Moussa said the grief hit even before the freed detainees got off the bus on Monday. Some shouted out the bus windows to people they knew in the cheering crowd welcoming them and asked about brothers, mothers and fathers.
Often, he said, their reply was terse: “God rest their souls.”
Taken as his family fled
Abu Moussa suffered his first loss soon after Israel launched its campaign aiming to destroy Hamas after the militants’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Eight days later, an airstrike hit his family’s home in the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, while he was on duty in Nasser Hospital, where he worked as a radiology technician. Video circulating online at the time showed him and his wife, Rawan Salha, rushing around the hospital in search of their son, Youssef, among the casualties. “He’s 7 years old, curly hair, fair-skinned and beautiful,” Salha cried.
The boy had been brought in dead. Also killed in the strike were the wife of one of Abu Moussa’s brothers and their two children.
In the next months, Abu Moussa worked constantly as wounded flowed into the hospital, where Salha and his two surviving children were also sheltering along with hundreds of others driven from their homes. In February 2024, Israeli forces surrounded the hospital, preparing to storm the facility to search for suspected militants. They demanded everybody leave but staff and patients too critical to move.
But Salha refused to leave without Abu Moussa, he said. So they set out walking with their children. At a nearby Israeli military checkpoint, Abu Moussa was called aside with others for interrogation in a nearby stadium.
It was the start of his long separation from his family.
Abuse in prisons
Abu Moussa says his months in Israeli prisons were filled with abuse. Like the other detainees released back to Gaza on Monday, he was never charged.
It began in the stadium, where he said he was beaten with sticks and fists during interrogation. All those taken from the checkpoint were kept with their hands bound in zip ties for three days, given no water and not allowed to use a bathroom. “Almost all of us soiled ourselves,” Abu Moussa said.
He was taken to Sde Teiman, a military prison camp inside Israel, where he would be held two months. Every day, he said, detainees were forced to kneel for hours without moving – “it’s exhausting, you feel your back is broken,” he said. Guards would pull some aside for beatings, said Abu Moussa, adding that his rib was broken in one beating.
He was moved to Negev Prison, run by civilian authorities. There, he said, beatings were less frequent, taking place mainly when guards conducted weekly searches of the cells, he said.
But conditions were harsh, he said. Nearly all the detainees had scabies, an infestation by mites that dig into the skin. “People were rubbing themselves up against the walls trying to get rid of the itching,” he said. Despite requests, prison officials did not give detainees creams to treat it until a few weeks before his release, he said.
Bedding was filthy, and detainees were allowed no change of clothes. Cuts often became infected, he said. When they washed their one set of clothing, they had to strip naked and wrap themselves in a blanket – but if guards saw, “they took away the blanket and made you sleep without it,” he said.
Sick detainees or those with chronic conditions asked for medicines but were refused, he said. One man, Mohammed Al-Astal, suffered a colon blockage that worsened and he eventually died, Abu Moussa said.
“They treated us like animals,” he said.
Asked about Abou Moussa’s account, the Israeli Prison Service, which operates Negev Prison, said it was not aware of it. It said it operates in accordance with the law and that prisoners’ rights to medical care and proper living conditions are upheld.
Also in response, the military denied systematic abuse takes place in its facilities and said it acts in accordance with Israeli and international law. It said it investigates any concrete complaints.
Abu Moussa’s account mirrors those of many previously released Palestinians. At least 75 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons and detention facilities during the war, the UN said in a report last month, saying conditions in the facilities amounted to torture that contributed to deaths. One 17-year-old Palestinian who died in prison in March was found to have wasted away from starvation and had colon inflammation and scabies, according to an Israeli doctor who observed the autopsy.
Returning to devastation
Crossing the border from Israel into Gaza after the release, “the first shock was the destruction,” Abu Moussa said.
His home city of Khan Younis was unrecognizable. Entire neighborhoods were razed. He and his fellow passengers searched for landmarks among the shattered buildings.
The buses pulled into Nasser Hospital, where the crowd awaited them. Panicked at not seeing them in the crowd, Abu Moussa asked a hospital co-worker where his wife and children were. He assured him they were inside, waiting.
He asked one of his brothers about his mother. The brother couldn’t look Abu Moussa in the eye, saying only, “She’s coming.”
“He wasn’t being straight with me,” Abu Moussa said. After being reunited with his wife and children, he asked again about his mother and his sister, Aya. Finally, they told him.
Recounting what happened, Abu Moussa fell silent for long moments, overcome with emotion. His voice breaking with tears, he recalled how his mother had always been strong, refusing to cry after one of his brothers was killed during the 2009 Israel-Hamas war.
“She always kept a grip on herself, so we all wouldn’t weaken,” he said.
He wondered if the joy would have broken his mother’s reserve if she’d be able to see him return from his imprisonment.
“I miss her. I want to see her,” he cried. “I want to kiss her hand, her head.”

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on Saturday that the war in Gaza would not be over until Hamas was disarmed and the Palestinian territory demilitarized.
His declaration came as Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, handed over the remains of two further hostages on Saturday night under a US-brokered ceasefire agreement.
Netanyahu’s office said late Saturday that a Red Cross team had received the remains of two hostages from Hamas and handed them to Israeli forces in Gaza, from where they would be taken to Israel to be identified.
The issue of the dead hostages still in Gaza has become a sticking point in the implementation of the first phase of the ceasefire. Israel has linked the reopening of the key Rafah crossing to the territory to the recovery of the hostages’ remains.
Netanyahu cautioned that completing the ceasefire’s second phase was essential to ending the war and involved the disarming of Hamas and the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip.
“When that is successfully completed — hopefully in an easy way, but if not, in a hard way — then the war will end,” he added in an appearance on right-wing Israeli Channel 14.
Hamas has so far resisted the idea and since the pause in fighting has moved to reassert its control over Gaza.
The US State Department on Saturday said it had “credible reports” that Hamas was planning an imminent attack against civilians in Gaza, warning that would be a “ceasefire violation.”
“Should Hamas proceed with this attack, measures will be taken to protect the people of Gaza and preserve the integrity of the ceasefire,” it said in a statement, without elaborating on the nature or target of such an attack.

Rafah crossing closed

Under the ceasefire deal brokered by US President Donald Trump, Hamas has so far released all 20 living hostages, along with the remains of nine Israelis and one Nepalese.
In exchange, Israel has released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and 135 other bodies of Palestinians since the truce came into effect on October 10.
Hamas has said it needs time and technical assistance to recover the remaining bodies, which it says are buried under Gaza’s rubble.
Netanyahu’s office said he had “directed that the Rafah crossing remain closed until further notice.”
“Its reopening will be considered based on how Hamas fulfils its part in returning the hostages and the bodies of the deceased, and in implementing the agreed-upon framework,” it said, referring to the week-old ceasefire deal.
Hamas warned late Saturday that the closure of the Rafah crossing would cause “significant delays in the retrieval and transfer of remains.”

Digging latrines 

Further delays to the reopening could also complicate the task facing Tom Fletcher, the UN head of humanitarian relief, who was in northern Gaza on Saturday.
“To see the devastation — this is a vast part of the city, just a wasteland — and it’s absolutely devastating to see,” he told AFP.
Fletcher said the task ahead for the UN and aid agencies was a “massive, massive job.”
He said he had met residents returning to destroyed homes who were trying to dig latrines in the ruins.
“We have a massive 60-day plan now to surge in food, get a million meals out there a day, start to rebuild the health sector, bring in tents for the winter, get hundreds of thousands of kids back into school.”

Gaza killings continue 

Some violence has persisted despite the ceasefire.
Gaza’s civil defense agency, which operates under Hamas authority, said on Saturday that it had recovered the bodies of nine Palestinians — two men, three women and four children — from the Shaaban family after Israeli troops fired two tank shells at a bus.
Two more victims were blown apart in the blast and their remains have yet to be recovered, it said.
At Gaza City’s Al-Ahli Hospital, the victims were laid out in white shrouds as their relatives mourned.
“My daughter, her children and her husband; my son, his children and his wife were killed. What did they do wrong?” demanded grandmother Umm Mohammed Shaaban.
The Israeli military said it had fired on a vehicle that approached the so-called “yellow line,” to which its forces withdrew under the terms of the ceasefire, and gave no estimate of casualties.