THE Wall Street Journal provided this Monday new details on the Gazans who held the four hostages recently released by the IDF, based in particular on the testimony of neighbors. As previously revealed, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv were detained at the home of the Al Jamal family in Nusseirat, particularly wealthy people who own several houses in the camp.
The article reveals how this family lived their lives while keeping the abductees in their home. The father of the family, Ahmed Al Jamal, continued to work as a doctor and imam in a mosque. The mother worked in the same clinic as her husband, while the journalist son, Abdullah Al Jamal, who lived in the same house with his wife and children, monitored the hostages while writing articles in English about Palestinian suffering during the war.
Ahmed al-Jamal, a 73-year-old general practitioner, was a local notable. He worked in the mornings in a public clinic in the Nusseirat camp, and in the afternoons in his own private clinic. He is also an imam at a local mosque.
Neighbors of the Al Jamals told the American newspaper that the family’s proximity to Hamas was known, but that they were unaware that they were holding hostages in their home before the Israeli army’s rescue operation. Some residents of the building said they were surprised by the discovery, noting that it was difficult to keep a secret in a densely built neighborhood. “Sometimes you can even hear people coughing,” from one building to another, they noted.
The rescued hostages said that from their locked and guarded room, they could hear Abdullah and his wife, Fatma – who also works at a local clinic – and their children, going about their daily lives in the apartment. They were kept in a room upstairs, so they never met the children, except once, when they were allowed to go down to the kitchen.
The building on Bisan Street where the hostages were held was completely destroyed by an airstrike during the rescue operation. Abdullah and his father were killed in the raid along with Abdullah’s wife, according to local residents, who said their children survived.
A few blocks from the Al Jamal home, the Abu Nar family held Noa Argamani. The family was also killed and the building destroyed, according to neighborhood residents.
The June 8 rescue operation was accompanied by heavy airstrikes and resulted in a fierce battle in the streets of the city between soldiers and Hamas men, causing death and destruction, to the point where residents of the neighborhood publicly denounced the fact that hostages were held there. “If we had known that kidnapped people were here, we would have left,” several of them said.
