GAZA: A Palestinian journalist said from his hospital bed yesterday that he was abused and injured by Israeli security personnel on his way home to the Gaza Strip after receiving a journalism award in Britain.
Mohamed Omer, who writes for the pro-Palestinian Washington Report, said he was strip-searched and detained for nearly four hours at the Israeli-controlled Allenby Bridge when he crossed from Jordan into the occupied West Bank, en route to the Gaza Strip, on June 26.
“They wanted to humiliate me. I collapsed in tears ... I had to throw up twice and I fainted twice,” Omer said. “They asked silly questions about everything I had done during my trip to London and Europe and they made fun of me.”
An Israeli government spokesman declined immediate comment and said he would seek information about the incident.
Omer, 24, received the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, awarded to journalists who expose “establishment propaganda”, according to its website, at a ceremony in London on June 16.
Omer said that at the Allenby Bridge, he was forced to strip to his underwear by an Israeli officer who then “snatched it down off me”. He said two officers dragged him by his legs, his head sweeping the floor, in front of other passengers.
After he vomited and fainted, Israeli security personnel summoned a Palestinian ambulance to take him to hospital.
At a hospital in nearby Jericho, he contacted Dutch diplomats who had facilitated his trip to Europe, and they drove him to an Israeli border crossing with the Gaza Strip.
Back in the Hamas-controlled territory, he was admitted to hospital where doctors said he had suffered a nervous breakdown and that several of his ribs had been broken.
l A rocket fired from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip landed in southern Israel yesterday, putting further strain on a ceasefire brokered by Egypt.
An Israeli police spokesman said the makeshift rocket had landed near a kibbutz bordering the coastal enclave, causing no damage or injuries.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for what was the fourth such attack since the truce went into effect on June 19.
On Sunday, Israel reopened three of its border crossings with the Gaza Strip after cross-border rocket fire stopped.
Israel had shut the crossings on June 25 after an Islamic Jihad rocket salvo which the Palestinian faction said was in retaliation for Israel’s killing of one of its leaders in the West Bank.
Other Gaza militants have also fired a rocket and two mortar bombs in two separate incidents.
The Egyptian-brokered ceasefire requires militant groups to halt rocket fire in return for Israel gradually easing its blockade of the impoverished territory.
Israel sharply cut back the supply of goods into the Gaza Strip a year ago, after the Islamic militant group Hamas took over the territory from forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas’s more secular Fatah faction.
Hamas said yesterday it released the spokesman of a faction detained after the group fired rockets on Israel last week.
Mohamed Abu Irmana, also known as Abu Qusai, was released during the night “after being held for several hours,” the Hamas government said in a statement.
“An investigation was conducted into a number of questions, including the instigators of a violation of the truce and those responsible for firing rockets at Israel,” it said. – Agencies
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