Her Story
Hana Tahayneh describes the night soldiers took her from her children
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The soldiers came to the house in Jenin at about three in the morning. They searched it, tied her hands with plastic cuffs, covered her eyes and walked her a long way on foot. She was not allowed to say goodbye to her six children.
Hana Muhammad Muhieddin Tahayneh, 48, gave that account to the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, which published it. She was detained on 8 June and moved into administrative detention — held without charge or trial on material she has never seen.
It is her first time in prison, and not her first time inside this system: her husband, Sharif Tahayneh, spent ten years in Israeli custody before her.
She lives with migraine, rheumatism, an irritable bowel and varicose veins that hurt when she stands. She says the prison administration refused her a painkiller.
What the institutions can and cannot count#
The Commission and the Palestinian Prisoners' Club said on 5 August that women in Damon prison face repeated searches, shortages of the most basic supplies and punitive measures on top of them.
The counts around Tahayneh are published in fragments. A joint statement by the Commission, the Prisoners' Society and Addameer put the number of women in Israeli prisons at 86 at the start of April, twenty-five of them administrative detainees.
The Commission's running tally now lists 87 women among more than 9,400 Palestinian prisoners, with more than 3,376 held administratively. More than 700 women have passed through detention since October 2023, most from the West Bank, and no reliable figure exists for those taken from Gaza.
Behind each of those numbers is a night like the one Tahayneh describes, and a house where the children were still asleep when it happened.
Her own file carries no charge, so there is nothing for a lawyer to argue against — only a renewal date, and then another.
