KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — A Palestinian teenager says that Israeli soldiers detained him for five days last month, forcing him to sleep blindfolded and handcuffed in his underwear and to search and dig for tunnels in Khuza’a, his village near Gaza’s eastern border, which was all but destroyed in the fighting.
The teenager, Ahmed Jamal Abu Raida, said the soldiers assumed he was connected to Hamas, the militant Islamist group that dominates Gaza, insulted him and Allah and threatened to sic a dog on him.
“My life was in danger,” Ahmed, 17, said in one of two lengthy interviews on Thursday and Friday. As soldiers made him walk in front of them through the neighborhood and check houses for tunnels, he added, “In every second, I was going to the unknown.”
His assertions, of actions that would violate both international law and a 2005 Israeli Supreme Court ruling, could not be independently corroborated; Ahmed’s father, Jamal Abu Raida, who held a senior position in Gaza’s Tourism Ministry under the Hamas-controlled government, said the family forgot to take photographs documenting any abuse in its happiness over the youth’s return, and disposed of the clothing he was given upon his release. The case was publicized Thursday by Defense for Children International-Palestine, an organization whose reports on abuses of Palestinian youths in West Bank military jails have been challenged by the Israeli authorities.
The Israeli military confirmed that troops had suspected Ahmed of being a militant and detained him during their ground operation in Gaza, noting his father’s affiliation with Hamas. A military spokesman promised several times to provide more details, but ultimately did not deal with the substance of the allegations, saying they had “been referred to the appropriate authorities for examination.”
A military statement also challenged the credibility of D.C.I.-Palestine, which accused the Israeli military of using Ahmed as a human shield by coercing him to engage in military actions. Throughout the current conflict, Israel has argued that Hamas uses Gaza residents as human shields by conducting militant activity in crowded public places.
“D.C.I.-Palestine’s report represents a perverse inversion of a truth in which Hamas persistently engages in the use of human shields, while the I.D.F.’s code of conduct rejects, in absolute terms, such behavior,” the military statement said, using the abbreviation for the Israel Defense Forces. It added, “D.C.I.-Palestine has exposed itself countless times as an agenda-driven and prejudiced organization with scant regard for truth and a marked disinterest in Palestinian perpetrators and Israeli victims.”
Separately, the military tried to bolster its human-shields argument against Hamas on Sunday by releasing what it said was a page from a Hamas training manual seized in battle. The page — which bore no Hamas logo and which a group spokesman called “fabricated” — says residents should hide weapons in buildings to move “the battle from open places to the closed, residential areas, which serves resistance and jihadi work,” saying, “It’s easy for fighters to work from inside buildings” and avoid “attack aircraft.”
On a battlefield surrounded by intense propaganda on both sides, Ahmed’s case highlights the difficulty of determining what actually happened. The Israeli military has been reluctant to reveal details of many individual situations, given the threat of war-crimes investigations. There are also repercussions for any Palestinians in contact with Israeli troops, as was on stark display in last week’s summary executions of suspected collaborators.
Several human rights groups in Gaza said they had heard about Ahmed’s case, which was reported on local news sites, but had not verified it. Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, described the case as “trivial” compared with the killings of about 500 children and destruction of more than 10,000 homes during the Israeli assault that began July 8.
After a 2002 petition by seven human rights groups, Israel’s Supreme Court banned the military’s so-called neighbor procedure — in which civilians were forced to enter a hostile’s home ahead of soldiers — and later the “prior warning procedure” that replaced it, saying they were “at odds with international law.”
D.C.I.-Palestine said it learned of Ahmed’s case from an Aug. 9 item on the website Palestine Today, which cited a report by a Geneva-based group, Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights. After that, a D.C.I. fieldworker in Gaza interviewed Ahmed at length, met with his father and obtained Ahmed’s signature on an affidavit.
The group’s report said Ahmed detailed “an almost constant stream of abuse,” including “kicks and punches, whips with a wire and threats of a sexual nature.” In his interviews with The New York Times, Ahmed did not mention sexual threats, and spoke of violence only a few times. He said a soldier “twisted my arm and was holding it firmly” at one point, “pushed me violently inside the tank and tightened my handcuffs” at another, “brought a cable and beat me with it,” and, finally, “grabbed me from the neck firmly for about 10 seconds.”
Ahmed, the oldest of five children, said in the interviews that his ordeal began July 23 after a night in which the family huddled under the stairway of its two-story villa, horrified by the incessant sound of warplanes and artillery shells. While evacuating the next afternoon, Ahmed said, he stopped to look at a tank, and a soldier ordered him away from the crowd of about 200, then took him to a nearby home.
“He was interrogating me about the tunnels,” Ahmed said, referring to the underground passages that became the focus of Israel’s ground invasion after Palestinian militants used them to penetrate its territory. “He asked about my name, age and tunnels. ‘Where are the tunnels? In which places were there tunnels?’ I told him I’m 17 years old, and if I knew about a tunnel in the area, I would not have stayed here until now because you won’t leave the area unharmed.”
Over the next several days, he was moved among homes and made to walk ahead of groups of soldiers looking for tunnels. Food was scant, and his bathroom breaks were limited and monitored, he said; at one point he wrote a note in Arabic, saying, “In case I die or get arrested, please send my greetings to my family,” according to D.C.I.-Palestine’s report.
He said he was interrogated up to three times a day by an Arabic-speaking soldier. “During the interrogation, he releases my hands and eyes and acts in a friendly manner,” Ahmed recalled. “When he finds nothing, he would be outraged and tie and handcuff me again.”
Eventually, Ahmed said, a soldier gave him a tool and told him to dig for tunnels at a school and two wells. “He said, ‘The dogs are hungry,’ and he will let them eat me if we did not find a tunnel,” Ahmed said. “I dug for about 15 minutes, but found nothing.”
After his release July 27, Ahmed said, he walked for about an hour before hitching a ride to an aunt’s home where the family had earlier agreed to gather.
His father said he spent five days praying, hardly eating or sleeping, thinking Ahmed had been killed.
“When I saw him, I hugged him for five minutes amid tears,” said Mr. Abu Raida, 50. “He was tired, too exhausted. He was not the energetic Ahmed that I know.”