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According to documents obtained by Haaretz in 2019, Arbid had been deemed healthy by an Israel Prisons Service physician when he entered custody, and the next day, following his interrogation, arrived to the hospital in critical condition, with a suspected heart attack, broken ribs and contusions. At a certain point, his body went into kidney failure and had to be put on a respirator. He regained consciousness two weeks later. The attorney general decided to close the case due to a lack of an evidentiary basis of the commission of an offense, a statement issued on Mendelblit s behalf said, noting that the decision followed an examination of the evidence and was in line with recommendations received from the investigation team and the opinion of those in the prosecution who accompanied the handling of the investigation.
These days, 16-year-old Hamzeh Abu Hashem spends most of his time at home, silent, eyes fixed on the floor. Occasionally he gazes through a window at the street; sometimes he goes to his brother’s small store, down the street, to help out. His older brother, Mohammed, 19, is still in an Israeli prison. Qusay, his 13-year-old sibling – who is apparently wanted by the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet security service on suspicion of throwing a Molotov cocktail – hides out at night with relatives to avoid arrest. Hamzeh, terrified that soldiers will come back to his house in the dead of night, as they have more than once in the past, and still shaken by the barking of stray dogs, is waiting for better times.
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Jan. 15, 2021
Two competing forces will determine which way the coronovirus pandemic is headed in Israel over the next few weeks: the ongoing vaccination drive and the spread of the mutated versions of the virus. The victory photos from the amazing vaccination drive, which attracted worldwide attention, gave cause for hope, but at this stage the vaccinations still have not made inroads against the pandemic.
Now that the problem of vaccination supply has apparently been resolved, the high daily infection rates are overshadowing optimistic scenarios of the end of the pandemic. This has been accompanied by a recording-setting number of severely ill people and an unprecedented burden on the health care system, which is stretched to the limit. Contrary to the previous outbreaks, the system must now deal with a huge mass of sick people as well as 250,000 people in isolation, and at the same time conduct a national vaccination drive requiring complex logistics and enormous human r