Beaten, tortured and buried alive: What happened to the woman on the Israeli truck
Israeli soldiers stand by a truck packed with shirtless Palestinian men and one woman in the besieged Gaza Strip on 8 December 2023 (Reuters/Yossi Zeliger)
Hadeel al-Dahdouh was separated from her breastfeeding son for more than 50 days when she was thrown into the back of an Israeli truck. She tells MEE she was subjected to horrific torture.
It's an image that has provoked shock and outrage.
Dozens of Palestinian men, bound, blindfolded and stripped to their underwear, crammed in an open-top Israeli truck in the besieged Gaza Strip.
The photo showed shellshocked Palestinians looking cold, hungry and traumatised amid the chilly and rainy December winter weather.
But just to the right of the centre of the scene, one person stood out.
Hadeel al-Dahdouh, a mother of two, is the only woman known to have been abducted by Israeli soldiers when they stormed the Zaytoun quarter of Gaza City late last year.
Speaking to Middle East Eye in Rafah after her lengthy detention, she said that she, along with her husband, in-laws and neighbours, were injected with unknown substances and subjected to prolonged and violent interrogations and even mock executions while in Israeli captivity.
Choking back tears, Dahdouh, who is still wearing the same "prayer dress" from when she was first detained, is overcome with grief when recounting the degradation she endured.
Her testimony, which is drawn from her detention in parts of occupied Gaza and Israel, appears consistent with that of other former detainees abducted by Israeli forces following the 7 October attacks.
Israel's conduct of its war against Hamas in Gaza is already the subject of an International Court of Justice case in which it stands accused of genocide and an ongoing war crimes investigation by the International Criminal Court.
'If I moved, they would beat me'
Dahdouh told MEE that her harrowing ordeal began when Israeli forces laid siege to her area with tanks and other armoured vehicles, forcing her family - consisting of her husband, children, in-laws, and two members of the al-Mughrabi family - to seek shelter at their small home.
"We were taking shelter in the basement when Israeli soldiers bombed one of the walls and entered. They took us all outside and separated the men from women," she said.
"One of the officers called me and said: 'Come here, we're going to perform a test on you.' I asked him what kind of test - he then told me that it would be a small test on my hand and that I would be returned to my children.
"I was terrified. I was scared for my children's safety."
Dahdouh said that before she left her basement she handed her four-year-old son Muhammad and nine-month old son Zain to her mother-in-law as she feared the worst.
"Israeli soldiers then took us to another home that was evacuated in the Zaytun neighbourhood. Once we entered the house, they immediately started beating and torturing us," she said.
"They kept us there for a while before a soldier came and gave the men [some kind of] sedative injection in their lower backs. Shortly after, they started hallucinating and were not fully conscious. The soldiers did not tell us what they gave them, but I suspect it was a sedative because I previously underwent a caesarean operation and was given a sedative injection that also left me hallucinating."
One of the soldiers then forced Dahdouh into a stress position with her head placed on the floor and her arms tied behind her knees.
She said that her back was uncovered and she was injected with a substance near her spinal cord.
"For over an hour, I was forced to sit like this and was not allowed to move. If I moved, they would beat me so hard. I asked him what they were doing to me but they did not answer. They just started cursing me and saying: 'You are a Hamas bitch.'
"I was crying, begging, and saying, 'I swear to God I am not, I am just a normal citizen like everyone else'," she said.
"I don't know what they injected me with, but it was some kind of solution, and they also took something from my body, like a blood sample," she added.
Dahdouh said Israeli soldiers then interrogated her and the other men about the 7 October attack, asking what they were doing when Hamas fighters stormed the barrier fence and attacked southern Israel.
"[One of the Israeli soldiers] was asking me and hitting me hard on my back and legs. The plastic shackle on my hands was very tight and it was hurting me a lot, I told him: 'Please loosen it a little.' Instead, he tightened it even more.
"We were kept in this house for one night. In the morning, they took us to another place that they said was the Sharia court. There were more than a hundred detainees there. They placed me among the men and started beating me and throwing things on my face to scare me."
'I'II bury you alive'
On the third day, Dahdouh said Israeli forces dug what appeared to be a hole and hurled her and dozens of other men into it.
"I started crying and screaming, saying 'What are you doing?'. An officer then told me: 'I'll bury you alive.' I told him: 'Shoot us directly, it's better than torturing us like this'," she said.
"He started beating and cursing me, then he removed my headscarf, I was crying and I felt that I was falling. My feeling was indescribable.