The story of Samarah

This is a story from a friend of mine about her daughter trip to Palestine/Israel.

As you know she is a British subject who wanted to spend a couple of weeks Christmas holiday. seeing friends and family in Jerusalem and Haifa to “have a bit of fun” as she puts it. She arrive Sunday at 3:30 pm at Tel Aviv airport not expecting any problems . Sammarah is 17 years of age and is in year 12 of school in a school in the UK.

What she went through from the moment she arrived at the airport until she was sent back to U.K was unbelievable. She was taken in a white van to what I presume the detention center at the airport. There she was questioned by a “bulky big man who kept shouting at me and asking silly questions about my friends and family. I kept saying yes to everything he asked so that he would stop shouting”. The reason given to her for refusing to allow her in was that they thought she may not leave the country, even though it was clear from what she said and the school books she carried with her that she was a school girl .

At any rate after the interrogation , she was put in a cell “filthy small cell with a double bunker bed . the bottom mattress was filthy, the top one was rubber with many holes in it but looked cleaner than the bottom one. No bed cover apart from a very dirty looking blanket. I slept on the top bed with my Palestinian “kufia” for a cover. They initially said they would leave the door open as I was under age. But woke up at some point to find the door locked and kept that way all the time. I screamed my head off to get them to open the door but they did not. The food they gave me was a sandwich part eaten. I was given some water to drink and some tea which I held very tightly to warm my very cold hands. They took all my things away from me including my telephone and they refused to let me call anybody from my family to let them know what was happening. At 6:30 am I was taken by a police car to board a plane to UK, only to find out they managed to put me on the wrong plane which was heading to Denmark! Eventually I was on the right plane to London”.