// Entry #23

His mother remembers the exact date: April 28, 2002. He was only 20 years old when Israel’s armed forces captured and arrested him, then sent him to an Israeli prison where to this day, he has yet to be formally indicted with a crime.

Hussain Mustafa Al-Loh missed out on his prime teenage years. His father was getting too old and too ill to work so in 1997, Hussain left school and joined the Palestinian Authority at age 15. According to his mother and youngest brother, he joined it for the paycheck, not to fight. For the next five years, he fed his family from his own hands. His other brothers were not yet ready for work.

Hussain’s work ethic propelled him up the ranks and by 1999, he was serving as one of Yasser Arafat’s personal body guards. Stationed in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Hussain was forced to travel through multiple Israeli checkpoints to reach Gaza City whenever he was able to visit family. He had been through the crossings and checkpoints multiple times over the years but in 2002, Israeli soldiers captured him in a seemingly arbitrary operation at the Erez Crossing and transported him to the maximum security Nafha Prison, notorious for having among the worst conditions in the Israeli prison system. [Read more...]