By: Sammi Ibrahem,Sr
Illegally Nazi occupied Ramallah: “Riyad” handed the spoon to “Amjad”, “Your turn came, the soil here help, they strengthened the resolve,” a light blow here on the side, collapsing sand, collected by “Khaled” in a bag and hide under “sprinklers”, There are soldiers hovering nearby and watching each ant.
Time in Ofer Prison, west of Ramallah, was slow, while the three young men, seconds, and night and day, were digging a 15-meter-long “spoon” tunnel, which he managed to take from the “prisoners’ tents” to the “gated freedom gate”. “.
It was one of the prison’s adventures that the liberated prisoner Amjad al-Deek and his two companions, Riyad Khalifa and Khaled Shaath, lived before they died, to escape the prison hell and the torture of the interrogation, which is still experienced by 5,000 Palestinian prisoners in prison.
Amjad rejects “all that”
The battle began when Amjad was arrested in his third year at a checkpoint separating his hometown of Kafr Neama from Ramallah in 2001. He was subjected to a harsh investigation that lasted 65 days. , And food more than lousy, in addition to psychological torture more than physical, humiliation and deprivation, and a threat to the family. “
The beginning of the arrest was a shock for the 20-year-old, and a new transition from university life, gardens and libraries, to “cells, family rooms and courtyards on time,” in which the overall shape of his life changed, but one thing remained within him, “to reject it all.”
Despite the suffering of the families and hardships, but they shared sweet and bitter situations, it was the most difficult – as described by Amjad – when one of the prisoners is sick and you feel unable to help him, and prisoners lost loved ones, one of them lost his mother, and I hit my head in the door, oppression and oppression, nothing We do before death and oppression !, recalls Amjad.
“Laughter is the partner of tears, this is life,” Amjad put it, and so far whenever he remembers the situation of the “Ghazzawi pepper” he laughed as if it was the first time of the event. This is one of the prisoners who challenged the prisoner Alaa Abu Adi from Ramallah, to eat five centuries of pepper : “I give you 200 shekels if you eat them and see some”, before the challenge, but with the last bite, lying on the ground as he screamed, and the prisoners burst laughed: “Mesh may pepper Why Tkloh?!, Siboh Ghazazp.”
The inverted, which one of the prisoners tried to invent the movement “Falhwa” in her heart, lifted it on his head, but turned on him and scattered rice around him, and the reaction of the prisoners sarcastic him: “Stay like what you, Benji eat about your head.”
“We have to get out of Han.”
Good company was not absent from the councils of prisoners, even collected by the tent of his prison “Riad Khalifa” from Ramallah, and with them, “Khaled Shaath” from Bethlehem, and spoke out the “secret idea” in the mind of each of them, and the minds of everyone who passes on this place They said it together: “We need to get out of Han.”
As a meeting of the summit, they discussed, the advice of the mind, and more possibilities, Amjad recalls: “Perhaps it is impossible, there are no tools to help in implementation, and the eyes of the watch all the time, in addition to the morning queue and the sudden counting of their father, and all we have, spoons and a tool “We have our will too.”
“When we are frustrated and tell the story is difficult, we remember that it is a harder detector than we are in, and not harshest from prison and its circumstances,” Amjad said. Every second with salvation from this reality, even if it is impossible and insane. “
On one April day, they began to execute, and with every “spoon” stroke in the ground, the hope was enlarged in the heart. It passed like this.
On May 12, 2003, Riad walked in front, passing the first and last tunnel in their lives, examining the road from beginning to end, and how long it took to walk 15 meters back and forth. “.
“The tunnel was less than a meter wide and less than 30 centimeters high, with a narrow end at the end, deliberately, because the pits would pass under the outer wall of the prison. The somewhat slender bodily structure, to crawl in succession through it, to the end of it just above the prison wall.
“We were very tired to get out, but we forgot ourselves when we took one breath out of jail. We made our first victory, the happiest moment in my life at all. The shock is now backwards. .
At the same moment, Amjad recalls the questions in his mind: “O God, it is reasonable that we are righteous?” The world turned over in just seconds! “.
7 months of freedom
“We walked a good distance without being revealed. The prison administration knew the next morning and during the queue and counting that we ran away, that is, hours after our success in getting out of the prison, we had reached the mountains of Ramallah, where the country we know and possess,” Amjad tells us. .
The adventure did not end just by escaping from prison.
Everyone is chased now, and even their families are monitored. Not completed before arrest.
Silence for a moment and continue: “Khaled separated from us, somewhere else after 3 days, but he was arrested on the sixth day of our common freedom, and we stayed, Riyadh and his wife Fatima, and no one in the world except us, we live months in the mountains, where the pleasure I did not feel before, Azza It is accompanied by pride, a great sense that we have taught ‘Israel’, the army is bloated, and the drone planes on us.
On the night of December 12, Nazi occupying forces besieged Riyad’s house. An armed clash erupted until the last bullet that was announced after their discovery near the village of Kafr Na’ma. He was known as the commander of the Jerusalem Brigades in the Ramallah area. Then.
And ended their temporary freedom, shortly after, re-arrest “Amjad” tens of meters from the battle, and after seven months snatched from his jailer, to live a bright age in freedom, and see “the richest experience in his life.”
His red card
Returning to prison was the last thing Amjad wanted, saying “one of the most severe human being, is the investigation after the escape, the occupation officers compete in pressure, punishment and torture, and all the questions were then how you managed to escape ?! How did it ?, amid screaming from the interrogators who almost lose Their minds without answers. “
Even 10 days after the end of the investigation, and the reunion of Amjad Khaled, in prison again, they could not accommodate the loss, and the separation of “Riad” them, shouting voice: “I absorbed everything, even back to prison, but what I imagined his separation, we were only moment by moment, 24 hours with some, not able to absorb a reasonable martyrdom?
He was given a red card – of varying degrees of severity – that was identified in all prisons as a very dangerous person, especially for anyone who tried to escape or carried out an escape, and carried by about 100 Palestinian prisoners accused of trying to escape, including prisoners accused of digging a tunnel down Toilet in Gilboa military prison in northern Palestine occupied in 2014.
Amjad recounts that the red card made him a “unusual” prisoner, where he is placed on the front of his file when moving from one prison to another, to warn of his danger, and it also includes continuous transfers so that he does not remain in one prison for more than a year, and less than 6 months in the section , And sporadic isolation and intermediate procedures are individual, chained restriction at the time of the visit, more thorough inspection of his room and his bed almost every week. “
Amjad was sent back to the previous sentence, in addition to the penalty of escape, with a total of “16 years” of detention, and red card actions throughout the period, he tightens his nerve: “Despite exhaustion and hardship, it was a challenge and arrogance.”
He did not allow despair to permeate in his soul, healthy eating was his lifestyle, without smoking and no harmful carbonated drinks, and without canned, with the continuation of sports and maintain personal hygiene, in addition to his mental and psychological health, as he was a permanent reading, and has obtained a degree in history Middle East from al-Aqsa University in Gaza, during his imprisonment.
“Shortly before the release date, I began to have wishes and dreams. Amjad said, “Deliberate kill our joy.”
Today, 16 years after the escape, Amjad al-Deek sniffs the breeze of freedom in Ramallah, but his mind is full of memories for the comrades of families and their attitudes. , Who left him before his first arrest, echoing his famous sentence: “The night is fleeting,” and “Life is a battle.”
