Alajluni Family Raid (July 2023)

On July 20, 2023, at approximately 1:30 AM local time, around 50 IDF soldiers raided the adjoining residences of the Alajluni family in Al-Khalil, and during the raid forced the five women of the family to strip completely naked, some in front of their children, while threatening them with a large military attack dog if they did not comply.

Details of the Raid

At around 1:30 AM on the 20th of July, 2023 around 50 IDF soldiers amassed near the home of the Alajluni family in Al-Khalil and, according to witness testimony, around 25-30 of them forcibly entered their apartments and proceeded to go from room-to-room.

Women Forced to Strip

The five women of the family, 53-year-old Ifaf, her 17-year-old daughter Zeinab, and Ifaf’s three daughters-in-law: Amal, Diala and Rawan, who are in their 20s, were forcibly subjected to a strip search — even though the males of the family were not.

Amal, who was 25 years old at the time, was the first to be called into a room with three of her four children by two female IDF soldiers, who demanded via hand gestures and broken Arabic that she remove her prayer gown. After she removed the prayer gown, they demanded that she remove the rest of her clothing. She attempted to refuse and tried to reason with them that she was only wearing her undershirt and shorts making it obvious she was not hiding anything underneath, to which they responded by releasing their huge dog, who came very close to her but did not touch her as it awaited a command from its handlers.

Scared of the threat of being mauled by the massive dog, and with her children screaming the entire time, Amal asked the soldiers to recall the dog and then proceeded to remove the rest of her clothes. The children, who were in a state of panic, had to watch as she was made to turn around, naked, for the female soldiers to inspect.

The soldiers then forced Ifaf to subject to a strip search, and then approached 24-year-old Diala. When Diala refused to remove her clothing beyond the prayer gown, the soldiers threatened to release the dog upon her, so she complied. The soldiers then made 17-year-old Zeinab enter the room, and demanded that she too strip. She screamed and refused, insisting that she didn't have anything on her, at which point they threatened her as well with the dog. Diala, from outside the room, heard Zeinab's screams and yelled telling her to just comply with the soldiers. After stripping, the soldiers demanded that she turn around for them to see or inspect, and when she only half-complied, they again threatened her with the dog.

Theft of Belongings

During the raid, the soldiers refused to let the inhabitants of the home secure their gold or cash. After the raid, the family discovered that gold purchased by the youngest son, Mohammad, in preparation for his wedding worth ₪ 40,000 (approximately $10,500) and 2,000 shekels belonging to Harbi and his wife, Diala, were missing. They reported the theft to an Israeli police department in the nearby Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba, where they were informed that nothing was taken from them. The following day, however, an IDF officer phoned Mohammad and told him to come pick up his gold, which they claimed they mistook for bullets. The army denied any knowledge of the missing cash, which was never returned to the family.

Response to the Raid

The Palestinian women bravely agreed to go on the record with their names and testimony regarding the incident; four of whom spoke with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz for an article on the raid, while B'Tselem published a report on the incident that included testimony from three of them.

According to an article in the Times of Israel, several Palestinian factions made statements:

• Hamas said the particulars of the raid were a “dangerous escalation that the Palestinian people and their resistance will not ignore,” and that the “violations committed by the fascist occupation […] will fall in the face of our steadfastness […] until the last soldier and settler are uprooted from our occupied land.”
• Tarik Salami, a representative of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, made a general call for Palestinians in Al-Khalil and the rest of the occupied West Bank to “escalate their confrontations with the occupation” and “avenge the free women against whom this grave violation occurred,” according to the Middle East Monitor.
• A rally was organized by the women's section of PIJ in Gaza, in which dozens of women participated. Women's PIJ head Sa’ida Hallas said “this shameful act by the [Israeli] occupation must not be tolerated by the Palestinian people nor by any Muslim.”
• UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Palestine, Francesca Albanese on twitter: The reports of masked soldiers storming Palestinian homes @ night, waking up families, forcing women to strip naked @ rifle point under threat of releasing attack dogs, while children scream in terror, are absolutely appalling. This relentless assault on people & rights must end.