The first attack had been a decoy to divert resources from subsequent ones. It occurred at a remote checkpoint. Two soldiers were killed with a torrent of arrows from three comrades. This checkpoint was only minutes away from a military outpost, but our comrades piled large stones in the road to delay rescue and backup. The automatic weapons and hand grenades seized from the dead soldiers were used to attack the Israeli reinforcements. The second checkpoint assault was the same as the first. With Israel’s resources diverted to those areas, Ghassan and six others attacked a third checkpoint, one of the largest and most heavily manned. They used what working guns they had obtained from the Russian smugglers. As Israeli soldiers began to retreat inside the fortified terminal, Ghassan’s brigade descended upon them. About twenty Palestinians who had simply been waiting to pass through the checkpoint spontaneously joined the fighters, overwhelming the few soldiers who had not had time to hide behind bulletproof walls. There was a fourth attack similar to the first two.

Israel killed Ghassan that day. Military backup arrived on the scene and sprayed the Palestinian fighters with hails of bullets. A newspaper clipping quoted Ghassan’s mother pleading for the return of her son’s body, so she could bury him next to his father and younger brother, Jandal. One of my interrogators showed me a photo of Ghassan, lifeless and bloodied on the side of the road. I vomited, and vomited again imagining Jumana seeing it, then felt relief that it wasn’t Bilal, then shame for feeling relief.

Bilal had been with Ghassan at the third checkpoint. There were even rumors that Mhammad was there too. It shocked me to hear that, and I don’t know if it was true. It became clear, however, that Mhammad hadn’t been in Canada all those years. It was reported he had been living in Tel Aviv, working as a bartender. Whatever the truth, Mhammad turned up dead weeks after my arrest, his corpse still bearing the marks of torture, perhaps because they believed he was hiding Bilal.

Israel lost its mind and launched an all-out war against all Palestinians, including those with Israeli citizenship inside the 1948 territories, the so-called Green Line. Their fighter planes dropped bombs on schools, mosques, business centers, and factories in the West Bank and Gaza. They rounded up thousands of men and women, exacting vengeance. Five million people were subjected to curfews and various collective punishments. And Israel became consumed by a national scandal involving a top general named Itamar who, it turned out, had had an affair with an Arab named Mhammad, the older brother of their most-wanted man. Israeli authorities accused him of unwittingly aiding Bilal’s escape. They blamed his “oriental roots,” because he was an Iraqi Jew. They blamed the Jewish tendency for kindness toward non-Jews, and let it stand as a warning to whoever trusted Arabs.