865: The Other Territory

Ira Glass

A quick warning-- there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

Hah-med's got the vibe of a guy who can handle anything-- a beefy Tony Soprano type, but without the menace. We're in this big, white, four-wheel-drive pickup truck that he tools around in, me and him and a producer. Sawsan Khalife. And Hah-med's task this morning requires ingenuity. His task? He's got to get to work. Step one, get himself out of Hebron, the city where he lives. This is in the West Bank, so movement on the roads is controlled by the Israeli army. And every day, the army changes which exits out of the city are open.

Ira Glass

These are WhatsApp and Telegram groups. Today, they say that only two roads are open in and out of the city of a quarter million people. We drive to one of them, where a handful of soldiers with assault rifles are manning a checkpoint.

Ira Glass

Today, we're lucky. We're early. The line's short. And they wave us through without stopping. After 7:30, Hah-med says, they stop every car and it gets really backed up. Hah-med works for a company called COMET-ME that sets up solar power, and internet, and water systems in Palestinian villages around the West Bank. So he spends a ton of time driving from place to place and has had to become this kind of weird expert in a thousand details of checkpoints and closed roads and tricks to get around. That suits him.

Ira Glass

I'm the kind of person who likes to talk to everyone, and learn everything, and hear everything, he says. His truck is outfitted with video cameras in case we have any kind of run in with Israeli settlers or the Army. Hah-med's had frightening moments when soldiers pulled guns on him. 45 minutes into our drive, he pulls over and points to a winding road that climbs up the side of a long, steep hill in the desert.

Ira Glass

It's easier to explain this in Arabic, so Sawsan jumps in to translate.

Ira Glass

It's called the container crossing, apparently, because a man used to have a little roadside stand in an old shipping container there. Now it's the notorious checkpoint that divides the north of the West Bank from the south.

Ira Glass

One possible alternative route is an unpaved road that curves away in the distance that Hah-med points to. But he doesn't like that option, because it delivers you to another checkpoint that could be an hour and a half wait.

Within minutes, we're off the highway and speeding down a two-lane street with houses close on either side. The danger with this route, Hah-med says, is that we're going to drive by an Israeli settlement, where we can get pulled over for hours, though, he has a plan for that. There are people he knows nearby that he can claim that we're visiting if we're stopped. We pop out into a clearing, then turn down an unpaved, rocky-- I don't even want to call this a road. It's more like a ledge on the edge of a cliff.

Ira Glass

At one point in this trip, we're on a bumpy, slow road, and Hah-med points to an overpass with a freeway that is just for Israelis. Cars with Israeli plates whiz by. They go through fewer checkpoints. This whole unequal road system that's way faster for Israelis and way harder for Palestinians, it's nothing new in the West Bank.

But after October 7, after the Hamas attack, where some 1,200 Israelis were killed and another 250 taken hostage, the worst attack in Israel's history, Israeli government struck back not just in Gaza, where Hamas is based, where Israel has now killed over 60,000 people. They also took action in the West Bank in all kinds of ways. Just one of them was that they installed hundreds of new checkpoints and roadblocks.

From the highway, you see these yellow and orange gates that are locked shut one after another, blocking off passage to Palestinian villages, isolating them. Sometimes you see people going around the gates and running across the highway to get everyday stuff done. We pass one roadblock. It's a mound of rocks piled 6 or 7 feet high in the middle of a street. Another is a big gate that Hah-med points to and says that behind it is a community that his company, COMET, provides services to.

Ira Glass

Our trip this morning ends up taking 2 and 1/2 hours. We end up in a tiny village outside Jericho. Hah-med says the checkpoints and roadblocks added over an hour to the trip.

Ira Glass

His team is putting in water filtration and security cameras this particular day. And one of his coworkers was not as lucky on the roads. I'll call him Sam. All these names are made up, by the way. They all worry about retaliation from the Israelis. Sam came to work in this village today from the North, which should have taken less than an hour. But because of a checkpoint, it took six.

Ira Glass

The Israeli military categorically denies that it's using checkpoints and roadblocks to disrupt the lives of Palestinians. A spokesperson wrote to us that security forces operate, quote, "under a complex security reality, where terrorists embed themselves within the civilian population. Accordingly, there are checkpoints and ongoing efforts to monitor movement." They said the military tries to maintain, quote, "as much as possible, the routine of everyday life of the population of the area."

Sam sees it differently. He described the feeling of helplessness that he gets waiting for hours in line at a checkpoint in this way that I didn't totally get. Let me share this with you. He says it feels like your hand or some other piece of your body has been cut off and is lying on the ground in front of you. And you see it there. And you can't do anything about it.

Ira Glass

It's an occupation, he's saying. So much has gotten worse in the West Bank since October 7 for Palestinians-- more violence, more of them driven off their land. The Israeli government has done things to choke the economy. Unemployment has soared. There's been a wave of people arrested and imprisoned with no charges and no trials.

But I'm starting today's program talking about roadblocks and checkpoints. Because when I talked to people around the West Bank about what feels different since October 7, so many people pointed to just this everyday stuff. Like, the difficulty of getting from place to place has gotten harder. As Hah-med put it--

Ira Glass

It squeezes on your life, Hah-med says, stresses him out. When he goes to the doctor these days, his blood pressure is higher than in the past. He gets mad about little stuff. He knows that he's overreacting. We're going to spend today's whole show in the West Bank. And I think I should pause now, just so everybody is on the same page about what the West Bank is.

So if you picture Israel, it's a country roughly the size and shape of New Jersey. Gaza, where the Gaza war's been happening, is a little strip of land carved out in the West. 2 million Palestinians live there, roughly. 3 million Palestinians live in the West Bank. It is a much, much bigger chunk of land on the East side. OK, I know-- east side, West Bank. It's called the West Bank because it runs along the West Bank of the Jordan River.

Israel took over the West Bank and Gaza in a war in 1967 and put them under military occupation until It figured out whether it was going to make that land part of Israel or give it to the Palestinian people in exchange for peace. If the Palestinian people are ever going to get their own state, the West Bank will probably be the heart of it. Still with me?

All right. So trying to understand what was happening on the West Bank, there's this kind of remarkable document that I learned about. It was written by the Israeli government minister who was called the Overlord of the West Bank by one Israeli publication because, basically, he calls the shots there for the current government.

His name is Bezalel Smotrich. And before he got this job, back in 2017, when he was a member of the Israeli parliament, he published a manifesto whose title roughly translates to "The Decisive Plan," in which he argues that as long as Palestinians continue to hope for their own homeland, the conflict between Jews and Palestinians is going to continue forever. They'll always be at war.

And so he says Israel's first goal should be to destroy hope, destroy Palestinians' hopes of ever getting their own state or homeland. And he says Israel can do that by claiming more land and building more homes for Jews, by changing the facts on the ground until, for Palestinians, quote, "The point will come when frustration will cross the threshold of despair and will lead to acceptance and understanding that the cause stands no chance. It simply isn't going to happen."

At that point, he says Israel should offer them a choice-- leave and go elsewhere, or stay as second-class residents, not full citizens. and? Israel will be a Jewish state, quote, "from the river to the sea."

Smotrich turned down a request for an interview. But in the last two weeks, he made international headlines describing his current intentions for the West Bank.

Ira Glass

He was at an Israeli settlement outdoors at a podium, announcing that Israel was going to be building thousands of new homes in the West Bank in a spot that would effectively split the West Bank in half. The line that made international headlines was when Smotrich said, "This reality completely buries the idea of a Palestinian state."

Ira Glass

In the last few weeks, France, Britain, Australia, and Canada have announced their intention to possibly recognize a Palestinian state. And Smotrich addressed those countries directly in his speech in terms that echoed his decisive plan.

Ira Glass

He's saying, anybody who tries to recognize the Palestinian state today in the world will receive our answer on the ground, not in documents, not in decisions or statements, but in facts-- facts of houses, facts of neighborhoods, roads, and more and more Jewish families that build lives.

Today on our show, we go to the West Bank. I think the horror of what has been happening in Gaza has taken up so much of our attention that lots of us, me included, haven't really taken in the dramatic changes in the West Bank since October 7 in settlements, in violence, in daily life under Minister Smotrich and the current government.

Israel's actions right now in the West Bank seem to have two goals-- to crush the idea that a Palestinian state will ever be there and, as Smotrich wrote in 2017, to drive Palestinians to cross the threshold of despair. When he wrote, that he was talking about building Israeli settlements, but I think it might also describe lots of things that have been happening lately. Some of the details of this really surprised me. I'm guessing they might surprise you too. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, our show today about the West Bank. Act One, Ali and the Duster. So the current Israeli government took power about a year before October 7. From the start, it's been aggressively on the side of helping Jewish settlers build more homes and take more territory in the West Bank. Minister Smotrich talks about this proudly, how they've approved record numbers of new homes for Israelis there. All these settlements are seen as illegal under international law by most of the international community.

But as part of that expansion, settlers have been pushing Palestinians off their land in the West Bank in record numbers. A group in Israel that monitors settlement expansion, Peace Now's Settlement Watch project, says that since October 7, settlers have pushed more than 80 Palestinian communities off their land. Before October 7, settlers had only done that six times. And there's way more violence now against Palestinians in the West Bank, by the Israeli military and Israeli settlers, since October 7, and way more Palestinians killed than in the past.

Hagit Ofran, the co-director of Settlement Watch, described Israel's attitude since October 7 this way.

Ira Glass

One of the producers of today's show is an Israeli journalist, Yael Even Or. She was interested in what it's like for these Palestinian communities coming under all this increased pressure to leave. And she was calling around, talking to lots of people, until somebody said to her, you know who should call about this? Ali Awad.

Ali's 27. He lives in a tiny village called Tuba, one of 19 villages in an area called Masafer Yatta, where they filmed that movie No Other Land that won the Oscar this year and where the intimidation and harassment has been intense. Ali had been studying for his masters in English. He wanted to be a college English teacher. But instead, he's become kind of the protector of his little village.

Yael talked to him over months, as he had to deal with an escalating series of events that really demonstrate how things are changing in lots of parts of the West Bank. Here's Yael.

Yael Even Or

When I first talked to Ali, back in November, the main thing he was doing all day was driving people around-- to their doctor's appointments, family gatherings, the police station. He has the only car in Tuba, one car for 80 people

Yael Even Or

Ali's car is important to Tuba because the village is totally isolated. There's only one road in and out. Tuba is way up on a hill, and the road is rocky, valleys right below you. It requires a skilled driver and an SUV.

But what probably makes it hardest to go in and out of Tuba are the settlements. They surround Tuba on three sides and cut it off from the rest of the Palestinian villages nearby. The Palestinians can't walk or drive through them, so Ali drives everyone up and down the rocky hill. He told me he's the taxi driver, the grocery delivery guy, and the ambulance driver, all combined.

One of the first things you see when you get to Tuba are the animals. Ali's family are shepherds. He gave me a tour. There are camels, chickens, goats, and hundreds of sheep.

Yael Even Or

Ali's telling his cousin, Jude, who's nine, to get off the tractor. Here's the other thing you'd see in Tuba right away, besides the animals. It's Israel's flag, which feels completely out of place overlooking this Palestinian village. It's at the top of the hill, just above Ali's family's compound. Ali thinks it was placed there by settlers from the nearby outpost, Chavat Maon. Right after October 7, they built a road from the outpost to the top of the hill.

Yael Even Or

The flag hovers over Tuba-- a reminder from the settlers, day and night, we're right here.

One of the first problems that cropped up after October 7 that kept Ali and his car busy was how to get kids to school. For 19 years, the kids from Tuba had the Israeli military escort them as they walked to school, sometimes with an armored military vehicle. Because to get to school, they had to walk through Chavat Maon, the outpost. And the settlers would attack them on their way, throw rocks at them.

It happened to Ali when he was a kid. I actually found some footage of him in an old Al Jazeera story. Ali was 17 at the time.

Yael Even Or

After October 7, the military refused to escort the kids anymore. The military told us that this decision was due to a lack of manpower and for security reasons. So Ali added to his list school bus driver. He started driving the kids, as many as 14 of them. They'd all try to cram in. Sometimes it would take two trips.

Yael Even Or

Ali now knows a bunch of not-very-important secrets, he tells me. The school is actually pretty close by, about 1.5 miles, but he has to take this long way around because he can't go near the outpost. The roundtrip takes him a little over an hour. That's the nature of the occupation in the West Bank. It makes the Palestinians constantly work harder to get back to the thing that was normal a second ago, even though it wasn't even normal in the first place.

The house Ali shares with his uncle and aunt is on a little rise. His room doesn't have much on the walls. He's not big on decorations. There are only two photos. Both of them are of his car. One is a total glam shot of the car at the car wash.

Yael Even Or

Ali bought her after the first car he got broke on the highway one day. Not to name names, but it was a Kia Sportage. This one is much better, a Romanian car, a Dacia Duster, an SUV. His is white. If cars had faces, I'd say this one is frowning. Ali keeps it in top shape, so it never breaks down near a settlement and can always get out of a dangerous situation quickly. He spends nearly all of his money on it.

Yael Even Or

The thing is, it's not just Palestinians in the area who know the Dacia Duster. Some settlers know it too. In January, three months after October 7, Ali was driving his neighbor. They were on the highway. Suddenly, another driver threw a glass bottle at them. It shattered a mirror. It was very scary. Ali thinks it might have been a nearby settler who recognized his car. The neighbor told Ali he should drive less, keep a low profile. But Ali kept on driving.

The first settlers near Tuba set up shop in 1981. Today, about 550 people live there. The settlement's called Maon. They have schools, a library, youth club. 20 years later, an outpost, Chavat Maon, was established nearby. It's illegal under Israeli law. And nearly 20 years after that, Chavat Maon sprung its own illegal outpost called Maane Farm after the local settler leader who started it, Isaschar Maane.

This newer outpost is a sheep farm and a sort of Airbnb-type setup with a campsite as well. It has 106 Google reviews with an average of 4.9 stars. Ali has known Isaschar Maane since he was a kid. He remembers him harassing them on their way to school. And nowadays, he sees him around Tuba, he says, at least once a week. We reached out to Isaschar Maane for comment but did not hear back. His wife told us he had no interest in speaking.

Before October 7, the settlers would mainly mess with the Palestinians when they got close to the settlements. Since October 7, the settlers are closing in on the residents of Tuba and even entering the village. Ali told me and my producer, Dana, about a day last summer.

Yael Even Or

Four settlers wearing masks.

Yael Even Or

So Ali comes running and starts recording on his phone. Halfway up a big hill, he finds them. At the start of the video, you see two men. They're young, wearing masks. They both have large sticks in their hands. One has a rock as well. They're threatening his aunt.

Ali's pleading with them in Hebrew. Stop. Stop. Put down the rock. The men yell at Ali to go home. When he starts running back, they chase him. But then something surprising happens.

Yael Even Or

Ali is proud when he tells the story because it was a rare victory-- 300 sheep saved. Sheep theft has become an increasingly common phenomenon in the West Bank. A lot of times people don't get them back, which means losing their entire livelihood. Ali says 300 sheep are worth roughly $125,000. I've seen even higher estimates.

Ali doesn't really sleep at night anymore, thanks to the constant threats from settlers and his own hypervigilance. So he stays up most of the night and keeps watch over the village. He started doing this a few months before October 7. But after, he got even more anxious.

The government handed out weapons in settlements, at least 3,000 of them in the first two weeks of the war. They also gave ATVs to settlers near Tuba. And a lot more settlers began walking around in military uniforms.

I called Ali while he was up one night. He was in his room, sitting on his couch, getting up to go to the door every few minutes, where he had a good view of the family compound. He was drinking tea and smoking.

Yael Even Or

No reason for the settlers to pass through Tuba-- they have much better roads on the other side of their outposts. Sometimes Ali shines a big flashlight at them as they drive by so they know he's there, keeping an eye out.

After a few months of taking the kids to school, Ali found a different arrangement for them and then spent a lot of his time driving people to the police station to file complaints after altercations with settlers. But Ali doesn't have much hope that the police will help them. In the last two decades, 94% of settler violence investigations ended without charges, according to human rights organization, Yesh Din. Still, Ali goes to the police because he wants to have a record of everything in case they end up in court in the future.

Things got so bad in the West Bank after October 7 that in 2024, for the first time, the United States imposed sanctions on individuals and entities there. Isaschar Maane, the settler leader who started the nearby shepherding outpost, caught the attention of the Biden administration. They placed sanctions on him and on his outpost. Sanctions can make it really hard to use credit cards or banks.

But in January, Donald Trump took office. And the same day, he decided to call off all sanctions on West Bank settlements and individuals. We don't know if that's why, but after that, settler violence intensified in Masafer Yatta, where Tuba is. And my next call with Ali, less than a week later, was different than all the others.

Yael Even Or

I'd seen online that something big had happened in his village.

Yael Even Or

Ali gets out of his car. The parking area is in the middle of the compound. His family was all around-- his uncle, his grandma, his little cousins. He started screaming, telling them to run away. He was afraid the masked men were going to hurt them.

But he had another fear-- the car. They're going to destroy the Duster. So after warning everyone, he went back to the car. But when he got back to the car, he saw the attackers were already there. One, he said, had an M16-- and the other, a bottle of gasoline. He gave up, running the other direction to join his family, and started filming.

In the video, the sheep are running. Someone is throwing rocks in the direction of the attackers. We see smoke, flames. Things break. Ali realizes his little cousins, Jurie and Jude, ages seven and nine, are still in the house, next to the fire. He yells at them to come out.

Yael Even Or

The attackers, apparently done with what they wanted to do, run off. Just five minutes have passed. Ali goes back to the parking area, and we finally see the car in the video. Huge flames fill the interior and pour out of all the windows. Ali and I talked on Zoom two days after that happened.

Yael Even Or

Ali said that the attackers went into the house where the kids were. They didn't have time to escape. The attackers hit Jurie with a rock on her back and Jude with a stick on his elbow.

Yael Even Or

The second photo in Ali's room, it's the image of the car burning. The top part of the car is all fire. The bottom is charred. Smoke billows off to the very blue sky. The car was so important to Ali, to Tuba, that I was sure he would already have a plan to replace it. But he was paralyzed.

Yael Even Or

The police came to Tuba the same day to investigate. They sent a specialist to try to collect evidence. They took some rocks, looked for fingerprints in the car. But Ali says they didn't find anything. Two teenagers from Chavat Maon were arrested, but they were released less than a week later. Ali heard the case had been closed.

So many cars had been set on fire in recent years in the West Bank that a big Palestinian insurance company has started to offer settler attack insurance. They put out an ad with a picture of a car burning intensely.

After the Zoom call, I didn't hear from Ali for weeks. He stopped answering my texts. He was silent on social media. Finally, he resurfaced. "Sorry for my silence," he texted. "I hope you're all right." Turned out, a few days after our call, he had been arrested.

He was released the same day, never charged, but the police kept his phone. I reached out to the police about this and about the car attack and never heard back. Ali felt like so much had been taken away from him-- his car, his documents, which he kept in his car, his phone.

Yael Even Or

He got depressed and did something that no one here remembers him doing before. He took off, left Tuba for about a week and went to stay with a friend. His aunt, Aisha, told us that he never leaves. He's always there, ready to protect them.

But Ali was the most scared he's ever been. He needed a beat to be alone, to recover. Life in Tuba was always a struggle with the settlers around. But Ali says that since October 7, it feels like they're pushing towards a specific goal.

Yael Even Or

These are names of Italian towns. Ali loves Italy, but he's from Tuba. His family has lived there for generations.

Yael Even Or

In June, settlers injured more Palestinians in the West Bank than they have in any other month over the past two decades, according to the UN. About a month ago, a friend of Ali's was shot and killed by a settler in a neighboring village. Ali's friend was filming a clash between the settler and some Palestinian residents, so it's all on video. The shooter claimed self-defense. He was arrested but was released after a few days. At least 11 Palestinians were also arrested, including Ali, who wasn't even there.

Back when I visited Ali in April, he told me he'd made a decision about the car. He was going to fix the Duster, which seemed impossible to me. But then in June, I called him.

He sent the photo. The Dacia Duster was back.

Ira Glass

Yael Even Or. Coming up, an Israeli doctor tries to make sense of a case that does not make sense. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, The Other Territory. We're looking at what's been happening in the West Bank while the world's attention has been on Gaza.

And before we turn to Act 2, there are two quick snapshots that I want to share with you of life in the West Bank since October 7. Here's the first. It's a hall in a municipal park, a place where normally you would have a wedding or some other celebration, where 16 families are living, mats on the floor where they sleep.

Achmed Al-bazz

This room that you see here, this single room, 40 people sleep in it. There are no secrets. We change in front of each other. We sleep facing each other. There are no beds.

Ira Glass

That's Nawal Mohammed Mahmoud Haikal, 31, a single mother with two daughters. She spoke with journalist Achmed Al-Bazz. Nawal's here because of something new that the Israeli army started doing in the West Bank in January. The country's defense minister announced that month that the military was going to start using the tactics that they've been using in Gaza to level houses and neighborhoods, but now they were going to do that in the West Bank.

And so Operation Iron Wall attacked four Palestinian refugee camps that are basically cities, with tanks and airstrikes and bulldozers tearing up the roads and knocking down buildings, displacing at least 30,000 people, according to the United Nations. It's unclear when or if they'll ever be able to move back. When I talked to Achmed, the Israeli military had just published a map indicating what houses they were going to demolish next.

Ira Glass

OK, here's a second snapshot. This one, a bright, shiny car dealership, chock-a-block with shiny new cars.

Ira Glass

Abdalla AlNatsha is the showroom manager for Al Salaam Motors in the city of Hebron. This is a family business with a car lot, car repair, gas station, and-- curveball here-- French fry factory. And this is something I didn't really understand before I visited the West Bank-- is just what a disaster its economy is right now, for a bunch of reasons. But one of the big ones is that roughly 120,000 Palestinians used to commute from the West Bank into Israel.

And after October 7, the Israeli government forbade most of them from doing that, saying it was for security reasons, even though Israel's own security services, Shin Bet, said the risks could be managed. Shin Bet, in fact, said it would be riskier to leave so many people unemployed and discontent. But those tens of thousands of commuters were not just a backbone of the Palestinian economy. They were Abdalla's customers.

Ira Glass

People can't make their car payments, and the dealership's been repossessing vehicles. They've gone from selling 560 cars a year to 175. They've let a third of their employees go in all their businesses.

This bit also surprised me. Post-October 7, they say Israeli companies decided to stop selling them potatoes for the French fry factory. Abdalla also says that the local Palestinian government in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority, owes them $6 million for construction and agricultural equipment that it bought.

Ira Glass

The Palestinian Authority doesn't have money in part because the Israeli government has withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues from it. A World Bank report in June described its finances as a fiscal crisis. But because they are the only local buyers for this kind of gear, Abdalla continues to sell to them.

Ira Glass

This is the kind of family business where, once a week, they play volleyball together. It's brothers, and cousins, and Abdalla's uncle managing this business. And when I asked Abdalla's cousin, Wajdi, how this has affected him personally, how hard it's been, keeping the business going, he said that for the first time in his life, he's thought about moving away for a little bit.

Ira Glass

Every person I talk to in the West Bank seems stressed out about money. People with jobs are supporting people who lost jobs. Meanwhile, prices for food and gas are rising. The only business I ran across that seemed to be doing OK is this guy, Bilal. He sells this incredible corn that is covered in brightly-colored powders and sauces, including this TikTok-ready fluorescent teal sauce, from a stand on the street.

Ira Glass

He's saying that ever since October 7, people are just sitting around without work, not doing anything. And they wander around the streets. And corn? They can afford. His business has improved.

Ira Glass

So what is happening in these prisons? Well, in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel, Israel's Minister of National Security, a far-right politician named Itamar Ben-Gvir, enacted some changes to the prison system. Ben-Gvir is a longtime provocateur and ultranationalist, somebody who's been convicted of supporting a Jewish terrorist organization and incitement to racism.

After the Hamas attacks, Ben-Gvir drastically limited security prisoners' contact with the outside world. It didn't matter whether they were accused of any connection to the Hamas attacks or Hamas itself. Families can't visit it anymore. They can't call.

The Red Cross, which had monitored conditions inside Israeli prisons since 1967, is now barred. In public statements, Ben-Gvir refers to all Palestinian security prisoners as terrorists. The physical conditions inside prisons have gotten a lot worse too. Scabies infestations are rampant and have been for over a year. I didn't know this-- scabies is a contagious skin disease caused by mites.

Prisoners tell their lawyers that a dozen people are sometimes crammed into a cell meant for five or six. And Ben-Gvir reduced prisoners' food rations to the minimum allowable by Israeli law, closed the canteens where prisoners could buy their own food.

Ben-Gvir didn't try to hide any of this. Last July, he posted on X, quote, "Since I assumed the position of minister of national security, one of the highest goals I have set for myself is to worsen the conditions of the terrorists in the prisons and to reduce their rights to the minimum required by law." He told the Associated Press that the purpose of these changes was to deter terrorism. Again, here's Naji Abbas of Physicians for Human Rights.

Ira Glass

Palestinian prisoners began dying, many of them not very old, in their 40s, 30s, 20s. We don't know what happened to most of them. There have been a few autopsies that Physicians for Human Rights knows about, but even the families of the prisoners who get autopsies almost never get an autopsy report.

Here's what they get instead. They're allowed to send a doctor to observe the post-mortem examination on their behalf. This doctor doesn't actually participate in the autopsy. They just watch the procedure, then afterwards, write up an account, just a page or two, about what they saw.

And since October 7, their observations, these written reports, have become one of the only windows into what is happening to security prisoners inside Israeli prisons today. Dana Chivvis has the story of one of those accounts.

Dana Chivvis

The place where these autopsies are performed is called Abu Kabir. It's in Tel Aviv. It's the Israeli government's forensic medicine institute. Since October 7, courts have dictated that only Israeli doctors can attend autopsies on behalf of the families. So Physicians for Human Rights went in search of Israeli doctors who'd be willing to go on behalf of Palestinian families.

One of the people they called was Dr. Daniel Solomon, an Israeli physician born in Italy. He's on the board of Physicians for Human Rights, volunteers with their mobile medical clinic in the West Bank, a do-gooder kind of guy. Daniel had never been to an autopsy before. He's a surgeon, not a forensic pathologist-- those are the doctors specially trained to do autopsies. But Daniel said, sure, he'd go. He didn't have much time to prepare.

Dana Chivvis

Daniel had also never been inside Abu Kabir, the forensic Institute, though he'd jogged by it a bunch. The first time Daniel went, it was only three weeks after the Hamas attacks on October 7. The staff at Abu Kabir was still processing the remains of Israelis who had been killed.

In a different room down the hall, Daniel observed the autopsies of two Palestinian prisoners that day. Over the course of the next year, he went to five of these autopsies, all Palestinian men from the West Bank who had died in Israeli prisons. After each one, Daniel wrote up his observations.

One had, quote, "multiple signs of physical assault and injury." Another had "a relatively recent head trauma." Daniel saw conditions he assessed as treatable. One man's lungs were in the worst shape Daniel had ever seen. One of the lungs was surrounded by pus and completely collapsed. He was 23. Daniel's view was that, based on the condition of the lungs, the man would have been coughing violently and noticeably for at least a week.

Daniel's used to seeing bodies inside and out. He's a surgeon. Standing there, observing during the autopsies, taking notes, he kept a practiced emotional distance from the body, same as he does when he's in surgery.

And then this March, there was Walid Ahmad, 17 years old. Daniel had read about Walid's death in the news. It made international headlines, the first Palestinian teenager to die inside an Israeli prison since Israel took over the West Bank in 1967, according to Physicians for Human Rights. Walid was from the West Bank, a town called Silwad.

Palestinian officials told reporters he had fallen and hit his head, citing other prisoners' accounts. When Daniel got to Abu Kabir for Walid's autopsy, the staff there did something they'd never done on any of his previous visits. They warned him about what he was about to see.

Dana Chivvis

This interview was several months ago, before photos of starvation in Gaza were widespread. In the news stories about Walid, there was a photo of him from right before he was arrested. Walid looks like a strapping teenage boy, dirty blond hair, the beginnings of a beard. He's fit, a soccer star, hoping to join the Palestinian national team, nothing at all like the body Daniel was seeing on the metal table in front of him.

Dana Chivvis

Again, Daniel's account is not an official autopsy report. He doesn't have access to additional information, for instance, tests done on Walid's body after the autopsy. He doesn't know for sure how Walid got to look the way he did at the end. But his assessment is that however it happened--

Dana Chivvis

Daniel addressed his account of the autopsy, quote, "to the family of Walid Ahmad." Walid was a case where, in Daniel's view, everything he was seeing could have been treated-- his significant weight loss, also scabies. Daniel's account also said Walid had an inflammation of the colon. He did not see any evidence of a head injury, external or internal.

Walid's body had been sent to Abu Kabir with notes from the prison medical clinic. Daniel read them and wrote in his account that in December, Walid had gone to the prison medical clinic and, quote, "mentioned that he did not have access to sufficient amounts of food." Daniel said that according to the prison notes, Walid had said other prisoners were taking his food. The month before Walid died, he went to the clinic two more times.

Israeli law says that, quote, "A prisoner shall be entitled to the medical care necessary to maintain his health and to appropriate monitoring conditions as stipulated by an IPS physician." IPS is Israel Prison Service.

Dana Chivvis

The Israel Prison Service told me it doesn't comment on individual cases. But they sent a statement saying in part, quote, "All inmates are held according to legal procedures. And their basic rights, including access to medical care, are upheld by professionally trained staff, subject to internal and external review." It took Daniel a couple of days to write his account.

Dana Chivvis

Daniel's account with his observations went to Walid's father, Khaled. Until he got it, he didn't know anything about how his son died or why. He says he just got a call one night close to midnight, telling him Walid was dead. Khaled is the only one in the family who read all of Daniel's report. He said Walid's mother, siblings, and aunts couldn't bear to finish it.

Dana Chivvis

Walid, Khaled said, had cared how he looked, showered twice a day. In photos, he's always dressed nicely, usually in name brands-- Hilfiger, Polo.

Dana Chivvis

Walid was planning to go to university next year to study finance and banking, Khaled told me. Some nights after school, and over the summer break, he worked at Khaled's shop. Khaled's mother was Brazilian. He imports nuts and coffee from Brazil and elsewhere.

Walid was a senior in high school. From what I can see, his social media is filled with photos of him and his friends, often preening, often in front of cars, mixed in with memorial posts for young men who have died and support for others who are in prison. In a couple photos, people are holding guns. From the outside, it's hard to tell what any of that adds up to. But I showed all this to a Palestinian journalist, who said he's seen hundreds of accounts like this.

Walid had never been arrested before, his lawyers say. The military came in the middle of the night last September 2024. Middle of the night raids are the standard way the military arrests Palestinians in the West Bank, including minors. That was true even before October 7. But there have been so many more arrests since then.

Khaled says everyone was asleep when they came-- him and his wife, all four kids. At 17, Walid was the oldest. Khaled estimates there were 25 soldiers. He says some of them broke two doors, came into the house, and smashed the windows of the front room, flipped over couches, tore curtains.

Dana Chivvis

Khaled says Walid had on only his underwear and a tank top when they took him away.

Dana Chivvis

When I asked the Israeli military about Khaled's account of the arrest, they told me that no one filed a report complaining about how it was handled. Two weeks after Walid was arrested, five months before his death, he was charged with producing an explosive or incendiary device, which is identified as a Molotov cocktail, throwing an explosive device, and arson. The charging document is remarkably vague. There are no specific locations saying where the crimes allegedly happened or specific times. One incident supposedly took place, quote, "sometime during the year 2022."

One of Walid's lawyers pointed out that there's no complainant listed on the charging document, nobody who went to the authorities and said, this kid threw a Molotov cocktail at my house and caused damage to me. If there were, he said, there would have been more specificity to the charges.

The evidence against him seemed to be allegations from two other prisoners. Walid was being tried under Israeli military law, where the standards of evidence are lower than in civilian court. All Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to military law. That's been true for almost 60 years.

In response to my questions about Walid's case, the Israeli military sent a statement that said, in part, that Walid was, quote, "imprisoned based on well-founded evidence of his offenses, including testimonies from other operatives against him." It's not clear if Walid did any of the things he was charged with. His lawyer said he denied it, and Walid died before he could give his defense or take a plea.

Khaled spent six months trying to find out what was happening to his son in prison. He learned pretty quickly that Walid was in Megiddo prison, hours away, outside the West Bank in Israel. No one in the family was allowed to communicate with him. They couldn't visit him.

Throughout last fall and winter, Khaled went to Walid's court hearings in a military courtroom in the West Bank. The prosecutors and judges were all in the Israeli military. Walid appeared remotely over a video connection from prison. Khaled saw Walid for the last time like this, on a TV screen during a court hearing in February.

Dana Chivvis

Khaled says he saw him for only about 20 seconds. Walid died six weeks later on March 22. The family was informed two days after. What Physicians for Human Rights and others were learning around the time Walid died sheds light on how Walid might have become so frail in the weeks between when his father last saw him on screen and his death.

They learned that some sort of gastrointestinal illness was going around the prison. Lawyers for Palestinians in Israeli Prisons reported seeing their clients deteriorate from one visit to the next, getting very thin. Prisoners, including minors, told their lawyers they were vomiting, had diarrhea, were sometimes fainting, and were rapidly losing weight. Khaled, Walid's father, had heard about it from a friend of Walid's, who'd been in the same prison and was released.

We heard about it from another teenager, who was also held at Megiddo prison at the same time as Walid and knew Walid. He's 16 years old, and he first spoke to reporter Hagar Shezaf at the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz. In the Haaretz story, he's called Ibrahim. It's not his real name. I'm going to use that name for him too.

Ibrahim's experience in prison mirrored Walid's in several important ways. And he was an eyewitness to Walid's last days. He talked to my producer in the West Bank. Ibrahim and Walid were arrested around the same time. He said Walid joked around a lot. He was a talker.

Dana Chivvis

Ibrahim said they never got enough food. He said everyone was hungry and everyone stole food from each other. After the first two months, they weren't in the same cell anymore. And then around the beginning of March, Ibrahim got sick, was dropping weight, vomiting, diarrhea.

He said when he saw Walid, he noticed Walid had similar symptoms. Ibrahim was so sick, he said, he couldn't make it to the toilet in time. He said his sheets were filthy. He couldn't wash his clothes. He smelled. It made him feel like a little child.

Ibrahim told Ha'aretz that when he asked for medical help, he was given an over-the-counter drug similar to Tylenol and was told to eat rice and drink water. He said five of his nine cellmates had the same symptoms. Ibrahim said Walid deteriorated visibly. He said he saw Walid the morning he died.

Dana Chivvis

After Walid died, Ibrahim said the prison made a few changes. They separated out the thinnest prisoners and gave them more food, brought in a washing machine. In May, six weeks after Walid died, Ibrahim was released from prison 11 days early.

Ibrahim says he weighed 159 pounds when he entered prison. When he left, he was only 101 pounds, according to the parole board. The parole board noted he was, quote, "difficult to look at and a cause of great concern."

Dana Chivvis

When I visited Khaled in April at the family's home-- it's pretty-- stone, lots of tall windows-- he showed me Walid's trophies and ribbons on a display shelf in their sitting room. They were for soccer-- Walid was a goalie-- and also for kickboxing.

Dana Chivvis

And also a competition known as the math Olympics.

Dana Chivvis

The kid in Khaled's head was Walid suspended in amber, Walid from before he was arrested, this energetic teenager barreling towards adulthood. He had big ideas for the family business. He wanted to expand, open more stores, learn different roasting and grinding methods, get into cappuccino and espresso. He wanted the company to be a brand name.

Khaled had been planning to take Walid on a trip to Brazil this summer. Walid had never been. He had just signed Walid up for driving lessons when he was arrested. They were a close family.

Dana Chivvis

The reason Khaled agreed to an autopsy in the first place is that his lawyer told him it could help him get Walid's body back. It's the practice of the Israeli government to hold onto bodies of Palestinian prisoners, to keep them as bargaining chips. Hamas does it too with Israeli bodies.

Since October 7, Israel hasn't released the bodies of any Palestinian prisoners, including Walid's. So Khaled is still waiting. He still hasn't buried his son.

Ira Glass

Dana Chivvis.

Our program was produced today by Dana Chivvis and Yael Even Or, edited by Nancy Updike, David Kestenbaum, and myself. The people who put together today's show include Jendayi Bonds, Michael Comite, Suzanne Gaber, Chana Joffe-Walt, Katherine Rae Mando, Valerie Kipnis, Andrea Marks, Stowe Nelson, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Ike Sriskandarajah, Lilly Sullivan, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor's Sarah Abdurrahman. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Other people who worked on the show as reporters and producers-- Ahmed Al-Bazz, Jude Taha, Sawsan Khalife, and Hany Hawasly, editor Sara Yasin, translator Shani Aviram, Talia Krevsky, Bachar Al-Halabi and Dana Ballout, also voice actor Waleed Zuaiter.

Special thanks today to Henriette Chacar, Noa Cohen, Matt Duss, Oriol Eisner, Daniel Estrin, Kara Lee Francis, Neda Frayha, Ori Givati, Ramy Ghaly, Amel Guettatfi, Harlo Holmes, Matthew Hooper, the team at Hotspot Cover, Aida Kadin, Ariel Kahana, Jessica Montell, and Dani Shenhar at HaMoked, Riham Nasra, Raviv Rose. Noa Sattath, Gabrielle Schonder, Stefan Schmitt, Guy Shalev, Ofer Shelah, Yehuda Shaul, Hagar Shezaf, and Seth Freed Wessler.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who's like, yeah, yeah, Robert Frost. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.