When Israeli soldiers arrived at the modest house along an alleyway in Nur Shams camp on Wednesday night, they sent the women and four of the children out into the street but kept hold of Malak Shihab.
They took the muzzle off their dog, and it went straight up to the slight 10-year-old girl and sniffed her. Terrified, she pleaded to be with her mother, but the soldiers seemed to have just one phrase in accented Arabic: “Open the doors.”
The platoon pushed her up to each of the doors in her aunt’s house, according to Malak’s account, while they remained braced behind her, ready to fire at whoever might be inside. One door wouldn’t open, and in her desperation to obey, the girl remembers hammering on it with her head.
“I don’t know why. I just wanted it to open,” she said on Saturday, accompanied by her parents as she retraced her actions on the first night of the Israeli incursion.
The door was finally forced open with a rifle butt which left a hole above the handle, but there was no one on the other side, and the soldiers moved on.
The IDF rejected the allegations of the Shihab family.
“Such events are inconsistent with the IDF’s code of conduct, and according to a preliminary inquiry, this story is fabricated and did not occur,” a spokesperson said.
Similar allegations were made during an earlier incursion in Nur Shams in April and were also denied by the army.
This was her most terrifying experience of an Israeli raid, but far from the first in Malak’s short life. The Nur Shams camp on the eastern edge of the West Bank city of Tulkarm is known for its militancy. It has its own armed force, the Nur Shams brigade, a mix of followers of Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and other radical groups.
