‘Threatened with rape’: Lama Khater recalls horrors while in Israeli jails

They also, she added, threatened to deport her to Gaza and more, telling her that she was a prisoner of war and they could do whatever they wanted.

From there, Khater was moved for four days to Hasharon Prison, where she was held with five other Palestinian women in a tiny cell built for one prisoner and “extremely dirty”, she said.

They did not have access to water to clean the cell either, she added, explaining that their water supply was cut off for eight hours a day.

There was so little room that the six women had to take turns to sit and sleep.

Missing her family, suffering in prison

Sentenced to six months of administrative detention – which allows Israeli authorities to hold people indefinitely without charge – Khater resigned herself to her fate and wondered how her children and husband were doing without her.

But then she met a woman from Hebron who had just been rounded up in the Israeli dragnets and the woman told her that her husband had also been arrested, taken from their home on November 8 two weeks after she had been taken and also held under administrative detention since.

That meant that their five children were alone, probably even more worried and scared now that both their parents had been taken.

Khater couldn’t help but wonder if the raid into their home frightened her children, especially seven-year-old Yahya.

“A Shabak officer came to gloat at me, smiling and saying: ‘Your kids are now alone’,” Khater said.

Twenty-three-year-old Bissan told Al Jazeera that she had to leave her job and become “both a mother and father” to her siblings because the three youngest are in school and need constant care and attention.

She would take care of their food and clothing and tend to their emotional needs, she added.

“Yahya used to ask me and my father about my mother – whether she was eating, if she was okay, and when she’s coming home,” Bissan said.

The questions became even harder to answer when al-Fakhouri was also arrested, she said.

During that time, Khater was shocked at the level of inhumane treatment the Damon guards meted out to the women.

Sometimes they would use pepper spray point-blank against the women for any perceived slight.

They would also put prisoners in solitary confinement, severely limit their access to food and canteens to buy necessities, and deny them sanitary pads, she said.

Finally, she was moved to Ofer Prison at the end of November, to wait in a cold cell for hours with neither food nor water until she was freed at dawn.

Up to the very last minute, the officers and guards were threatening her.

“They told me that any celebration is prohibited and that I was forbidden from receiving any well-wishers upon my release,” she said, adding that the Israeli officers also warned her not to publish on social media.