If we painted every home in the West Bank where a Palestinian has been arrested during the recent aggression in Gaza with the color orange, 21,000 houses would be transformed across the landscape.
Let your mind enter these houses and think about the families who were arrested. Each one trying to live a normal life, probably sleeping peacefully at night, when they hear their door explode open, followed by the sound of boots stomping through their home. Children scream in terror as they’re dragged from their beds and are forced into one room at gunpoint. Soldiers search every corner, throwing clothes from closets, overturning furniture, tearing up family photographs, smashing anything in their path. They see their father, brother, or son forced to the ground, hands zip-tied so tightly the plastic cuts into the skin. Sometimes the soldiers blindfold him right there, in front of his children. Sometimes they beat him before dragging him out. A group of soldiers then takes one family member to an unknown destination. The family must reach out to different organizations just to find out where their loved one went, to which prison. The only accusation: they are Palestinian.
After the soldiers leave, the family sits among the wreckage. The door hangs broken on its hinges. Glass crunches underfoot. The house feels different now, violated, no longer safe. The empty chair at the table becomes a constant reminder. The waiting begins, days turn into weeks with no information. The family doesn’t know if he’s been beaten, if he’s received medical care, if he even knows they’re trying to find him.
The residents of orange homes know almost nothing about their imprisoned family members, except for very limited information from lawyers who, in the best cases, can visit them every few months for a matter of minutes. Families are deprived of the right to visit their loved ones. Those who have been released tell stories that haunt the orange homes. They speak of cells designed for six people holding twenty, of sleeping in shifts because there isn’t floor space for everyone to lie down at once. The food arrives spoiled and insufficient. Prisoners lose dramatic amounts of weight. Those with chronic illnesses are denied their medication, watching fellow prisoners deteriorate while requests for medical care are ignored or denied. The torture is both physical and psychological. Prisoners describe being beaten during interrogations, forced into stress positions for hours, deprived of sleep for days, kept in isolation cells no bigger than a bathroom with no windows and no human contact. Strip searches are routine and humiliating, designed to break dignity. The guards operate with impunity and prisoners who complain face retaliation.
I can imagine a daughter scrolling through Instagram, suddenly watching a video of Israeli soldiers attacking her father, beating him. Or a mother watching a video of her son as soldiers unleash dogs upon him, tearing at his skin. She learns they starve the prisoners and deny them adequate food and water. But the suffering of the families extends far beyond these horrific moments. When the breadwinner is arrested, the entire household economy collapses. Wives who have never worked outside the home must suddenly find ways to feed their children. Legal fees drain whatever savings exist. The wife becomes both mother and father, attending meetings alone, making all decisions alone, comforting crying children alone. She lies awake wondering if her husband is cold, if he’s been beaten, if he’s thinking of them.
The children stop sleeping through the night. They startle at loud noises. At school, they stare out of windows, unable to concentrate. They ask questions their mother cannot answer: “When is Baba coming home?” “Why did they take him?” How does a mother explain occupation to a six-year-old? The elderly parents age overnight, having already buried children to Israeli bullets, now not knowing if they’ll see this son again. At their age, every day their son is imprisoned might be one day closer to dying without seeing him.
Perhaps the cruelest aspect of this system is its treatment of children. Palestinian children as young as twelve are arrested, tried in military courts, and imprisoned. These children are arrested for throwing stones, for being in the wrong place, for looking suspicious. They’re dragged from their beds in night raids, interrogated without parents present, without lawyers. In interrogation rooms, they’re subjected to tactics designed to terrify, threats against their families, verbal abuse, sometimes physical violence. Interrogators show them confessions written in Hebrew, a language most don’t read, and pressure them to sign. Inside the prisons, children are held with adults in overcrowded cells. They’re denied education, their schooling stops the day they’re arrested. Months or years of their childhood are lost to concrete cells and metal bars. When they’re finally released, they return changed. The light has gone out of their eyes.
A father reads in the news that Israeli Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir continues his public incitement to maintain a systematic policy of genocide inside Israeli prisons through his repeated calls to kill and torture Palestinian detainees, promoted on social media platforms with the support of a powerful media machine. The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society said in a statement that this incitement coincides with dangerous legislative moves within the Knesset aimed at passing a law to execute Palestinian detainees and establishing an exceptional court devoid of any judicial guarantees. Hebrew Channel 13 reported that Ben-Gvir proposed establishing a detention facility surrounded by crocodiles to detain Palestinian prisoners. Another wife reads this article and imagines how her husband is struggling inside. Her children keep asking about him, but she has no answers. She has to explain to her child what “surrounded by crocodiles” means, and for many prisoners, I believe most of them have never seen a crocodile in their lives.
I don’t want in this article to refer to international law, because it doesn’t work in real life. The Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Against Torture; they’re beautiful documents that mean nothing when power decides to ignore them. The international community issues statements of “concern” while doing nothing to stop the torture, the imprisonment without charge, the abuse of children. What good is international law when it only applies to the powerless? The families in the orange homes don’t need more international observers documenting their suffering. They need their loved ones home.
And we’re only talking about people arrested in the last two years and four months. I haven’t yet mentioned those who have been in prison for 30 or 40 years. Imagine being imprisoned before your children were born, and now those children have children of their own whom you’ve never met. Imagine missing every birthday, every wedding, every funeral. These long-term prisoners have spent more of their lives in prison than out of it. Their families have aged alongside them, wives raising children alone for decades. Some of these prisoners have grandchildren now who call someone else “grandfather” because they’ve never known the man in prison.
What in this world can ease their suffering? What can soothe their hearts in the face of this immense affliction? Who will listen to them, give them answers, plant hope within them, and convince them that what is happening is known to the whole world, even if it is treated as normal, and no one cares? The families in the orange homes are not looking for pity. They’re looking for justice, for action, for the world to see them as human beings deserving of basic rights. They’re looking for their loved ones to come home, for the night raids to stop, for their children to sleep peacefully without fear.
How many more homes must be painted orange before the world decides that Palestinian lives matter?
