One Year, No Answers: The Killing of Abu al-Ezz
They found him in the house on the edge of Nablus at night, and arrested him with his brothers. It was 23 August 2016, five days after four people — two Palestinian police, and two men from the old city — had been killed in fighting, and the cops accused Ahmed Abu al-Ezz Halaweh of being the ringleader. They bundled the men out in the night, and began beating them, and kept beating them, and when they beat them at Jneid prison, Abu al-Ezz was killed.
“We’ll draw lessons from the incident”, said the governor of Nablus, but a year on and no one from the family has heard from the committee that is supposedly investigating. So, Abu al-Ezz’s widow, bitter, sits in her house in the old city and fills the official silence with accusations about why he was killed.
I went to Nablus to hear what she had to say, and to tell the story of how a hyper-local dispute spiralled out of control, leaving seven people dead, and thousands in the street calling for the resignation of the prime minister.
The problems started with a brawl. Only, with plenty of guns in the old city, brawls can get out of hand easily. On that day, 27 December 2015, it got out of hand, and Ashraf al-Baeh was shot dead. That was the beginning of a problem between the Halaweh family and another in the old city, the Ibn Hammameh family.
Abu al-Ezz was an officer in the Palestinian Authority (PA) security services, and a commander in the armed wing of Fatah, the political faction that controls the PA. He had been with the PA since its formation after the Oslo accords, his wife Noha told me, and since before then with Fatah. He was a power broker in the old city. “People came to him to solve problems, all it took was a cup of coffee,” she said. It was in this role that he arranged the surrender of six men from the old city wanted in connection with the ongoing brawl. The six included two of his sons, and they gave themselves up on July 20, 2016.
The shooting started on August 18 because one of the six was being denied medical treatment in Jericho prison. That was the rumour, anyway, and the protests over the rumour devolved into shooting, and two policemen were shot to death. Abu al-Ezz’s widow denies that her husband or her sons were involved in any way, but that’s not what the police said. They said that he was responsible for the shooting, and for other things besides. “[The PA] said he sold drugs,” Noha told me, an accusation she denied, saying that he was the one upholding the law. “How could he have been selling drugs, when he had been in charge of the security in the old city for decades?”
She alleges precisely the opposite was true. “He knew who in the Palestinian Authority was behind and profiting from the drug trade in the old city, and that’s why he was killed.”
It is not possible to verify that accusation, but I was told on background by an expert on the Palestinian security forces that Abu al-Ezz had been “a headache” to the PA forces in the city, and that the killing was said to be related to guns or drugs in some way.
The killing brought 12,000 mourners to the streets, and youths clashed with the cops in the casbah. His death was quickly rumoured to be part of the ongoing tussle between the president, Mahmoud Abbas, and his exiled rival, Mohammed Dahlan. Mourners, who included prominent anti-Abbas Fatah figures, called for the resignation of the prime minister, Rami Hamdallah.
One of the local Fatah politicians, Jamal Tirawi, is reported to be close to Dahlan. He was one of the four members of the Palestinian parliament stripped of immunity by Abbas in December last year, reportedly because of those links. Shortly after Abu al-Ezz’s killing, he had been happy to make connections with key players in the city and discuss the situation. When I wanted to get his views this year, however, he didn’t show up to a scheduled interview and then stopped answering my calls.
The old city is its own little world, and it doesn’t let go of its secrets easily: everybody here has their view on what happened, and they generally have got a reason to say what they say. If they will say anything, that is. Usually people will tell you almost anything about what goes on in occupied Palestine. Researching this story was different. People are scared to talk.
It feels as if the last wave of history broke over Nablus in 2002, leaving behind a residue of fading martyr posters showing men from another time: fringes gelled flat, unhealthy pallors, stonewashed jeans.
That the old city was such a bastion of resistance to the Israeli occupation is the reasons it now has such problems with the PA, Alaa Tartir tells me. He’s the program head at al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. Places like the old city were, he said, “known as “castles of resistance” [and] posed a “threat” to the PA’s exclusive use of violence and force.”
The period after the second intifada saw the PA security services launch operations in places like Nablus and Jenin to stamp their authority on them. “The resistance legacy and infrastructure of these places was the target in order to ensure “law and order”, yet and as resistance is embedded in these contexts, the PA aimed to criminalize resistance and equate between the criminal and freedom fighter.”
So, the PA often describe elements of Fatah who do not toe the party line as criminals, making it difficult to know if they really are engaged in criminal behaviour, or have just fallen out of favour. (Though of course, like men with guns everywhere, Palestinian fighters have not been immune to the temptations of power. Palestinians remember arrogant gunmen taking what they wanted from shops during the second intifada, for example.)
It is clear the families of the men killed last year see them as resistance fighters, posting tributes in the form of pictures on Facebook of the ‘martyrs’ posing with high-powered assault rifles. It is those same rifles that the PA says they were using for criminal purposes.
The head of media relations for the Nablus governorate seemed to have developed a curious case of amnesia about the situation in the city in 2016 when I spoke to him. I asked Ziad Othman what it was like in the city then, expecting him to launch into an account of the terrible crimes that led to the necessity of so much shooting. But no. “The situation was good,” he said. “There was no trouble.” Why then was there shooting then that the police arrested Abu al-Ezz for? “Why are you asking about that? It’s an old subject. The people are happy in Nablus. We have no problems.”
In general, PA spokespeople were not happy that I was asking about Abu al-Ezz. Adnan Damiri, spokesperson for the security forces, was angry when he heard the name. “You want to talk about Abu al-Ezz, a year afterwards? Absolutely not. I have nothing to say.” Another spokesperson agreed to answer questions, if they were emailed, but then didn’t answer the email and stopped answering the phone.
Othman, the spokesperson for Nablus, said that the committee investigating the incident had been working, interviewing people in the old city in the month leading up to the anniversary. The family, though, said that they hadn’t been contacted.
Perhaps the PA wish that they could just forget the issue. However, Abu al-Ezz was not the only man to die at their hands in circumstances that appear to have been much less than legal, and the family hasn’t forgotten.
In the early hours of 19 August, the security services announced that they had killed two men who they said were involved in the shooting of the police the previous day: Fares Halaweh (Abu al-Ezz’s nephew) and Khaled al-Aghbar. According to the PA, it was a gun battle, and the two were fair game.
Family members quickly alleged, however, that the two had been captured alive, and were only later shot dead by the Palestinian forces. It is an accusation that Amnesty International,* the human rights charity, supports, with the organisation saying that they spoke to two witnesses who saw the men arrested alive.
“One of the witnesses reported seeing security officers beating Khaled al-Aghbar upon arrest and dragging him to a waiting car outside of the Old City,” said Magdalena Mughrabi-Talhami, the organisation’s deputy director for Middle East and North Africa.
“The witness explained that the men forced Fares Halaweh to walk down Sheikh Musallam Street for about 20 meters while beating him, and then shot him in his leg.” The Halaweh family accuses the PA of taking the men to a piece of empty ground on the outskirts of Nablus and executing them there.
“If the men were killed after being arrested alive, as alleged, then they would be victims of an extrajudicial execution,” Mughrabi-Talhami tells me.
Fares, Khaled and Abu al-Ezz now appear together on the martyr posters that hang in properties belonging to the Halaweh family in the old city.
Grief is not the only way the family is still dealing with the fallout of August’s events. Five of Abu al-Ezz’s six sons are still held by the PA in the notorious Jericho prison, detained in connection with the incidents leading up to their father’s death. (The sixth is serving a ten-year sentence in an Israeli prison.) At least five other members of the extended family are also still detained, according to their relatives.
Fadi Halaweh, brother of Fares, told me that he was pulled out of bed by masked PA officers on the day that his brother was killed. “They beat me the whole way from my house to Jneid,” he says. “They were threatening, talking bad words to me.” He was relatively lucky, spending only two days in prison, but the experience has left him shaken. “Where are we living?” he asked me as we talked.
Other family members declined to discuss their experiences, telling me that all this talk had been for nothing, that the PA did not care.
The family’s lawyer, Mohammed Halaweh (whose father is the uncle of Abu al-Ezz), said that 23 men from the old city had been charged in connection with the killing of the two police officers, and a further 17 in connection with the murder of al-Baeh. “17 people charged for the killing of one person? 23 for two? It’s clear that they’re being held for another reason,” Halaweh told me in his office in Nablus.
Some of the men from other families have had their charges reduced and have been released, but with so many relatives still in jail, the Halaweh family feel they are being singled out. “It’s a punishment for me to be alone in the house,” Noha said. The lawyer pointed out that, in contrast to the tens rounded up in the old city, that not one person has been arrested for the killing of Abu al-Ezz. “The committee has not even visited the family. It’s been a year. That’s enough time, no?”
Noha is hoping that she can make them care, however. On the anniversary of Abu al-Ezz’s death she went down to the municipality with some supporters, protesting again. She was angry when I visited her in her old city sitting room, the walls covered in pictures of Abu al-Ezz. “Why did they kill him? If I’m a criminal, you can take me and judge me innocent or guilty.” That they did not do that, she said, means the PA are the guilty ones. “There have to be charges against those responsible.”
The last life taken was that of a woman otherwise uninvolved. On November 16, Hilda Arafat was at home in the old city, on the same street as the Halaweh family house, when she was shot dead during further clashes between police and gunmen in the area. The governor of Nablus said that an autopsy proved she had been killed by bullets from an M-16 — a rifle the PA don’t use, but the gunmen do.
At that time, last November, the streets around the Halaweh house were full of security officers, sat on guard, drinking coffee. Piles of empty cartridges clinked in the gutters.
Who were those men in khaki there to fight? Alaa Tartir says that the way the PA has deployed its forces in the last few years means it is increasingly difficult to tell. They have, he says, become “a mere tool in dealing with intra-Fatah crises and infighting, and the messy environment it created made it difficult to distinguish between disputes between families, disputes between Fatah factions and groups, and disputes over economic benefits.”
Depending on who you listen to, all those scenarios may be the reason for the killings last year. In the end, what remains true, however, is that three men are dead at the hands of the state, in what evidence suggests were extrajudicial executions, and that no one has been brought to book for their killings. Responsibility for the other deaths remains murky.
Now life in the city carries on. The place bustles with business. Lush piles of vegetables, the deep stink of poultry, the bright yellow of knafeh: all these assail you as you walk its stone alleys. The dead watch from the walls. Most of them are long gone, but you might come across a newer poster, a bright turquoise blue, with a triangle of photos arrayed upon it: Abu al-Ezz. Fares. Khaled.
*Full disclosure: I am an ex-employee of Amnesty International, and was part of the research team that visited Nablus in November 2016 and produced the findings cited in this article.
