Locked up with no charge, Palestinian prisoners tell of pain and sorrow as they are freed in hostage exchange
The 17-year-old Palestinian woke to the sound of his mother screaming as dozens of Israeli soldiers crashed through the front door of his family home and stormed into the bedroom.
“Are you Obada?” one shouted at the schoolboy at gunpoint, while another quizzed his younger brother lying in the bed next to him. This was June 2022.
Obada Khalil says he was questioned by Israel intelligence in Jerusalem for 38 days, and spent all but three of them in solitary confinement. His mother Badriya, 47, said she had no idea where her teenage son was and that he had no access to a lawyer.
He was eventually placed in administrative detention, which means being held without charge or trial, barred access to evidence against him – potentially indefinitely. It is a practice United Nations experts have denounced as unlawful as it could amount to
