Madeleine Eliyahu

While seven months pregnant, a fire broke out in the Sharon Jalil Transit Camp. Madelaine was able to save the toddler son of another family, but sustained injuries herself. After two weeks she arrived at the Meir hospital. Immediately alerted to her belly, the medical staff sent her for four days of bed rest in the designated ward, where she was bound by her hands and feet and kept immobilized under general anaesthesia (women in the neighboring beds told her about the repeated anaesthesia injections administered to her whenever she had as much as slightly nodded.) In the course of those days, she went into labor whilst unconscious and her son was subsequently taken from her. Her husband was asked to bring her toddler son (their eldest) so that she could breastfeed him and transfer the anesthetic from her to him (there is no evidence of her nursing him, while it is likely that her milk was pumped for the newborn baby). Later, having regained consciousness, Madeleine was told her newborn son had died, while no body was presented to her.

When she returned empty-handed to the Jalil transit camp, an Iraqi doctor (“one of our folks", as she refers to him) shouted at her, "I told you not to give birth there, I told you not to go to the hospital!”.

Going into labor again at the same hospital, Madeleine witnessed the kidnapping of another woman’s baby son, whom she heard crying and saw alive. Immediately after his departure she saw the woman deliberately anesthetized while another woman, not a member of the medical staff, took the baby in her hands. Madeleine tried to protest and demand the baby on the other woman’s behalf, but was casually dismissed. Madeleine then realized that it was undoubtedly a set pattern of kidnappings.

Madeleine goes on to tell of neighbours and acquaintances who had children taken from them, and in one case, when a family from Tel Aviv became alert, suspecting that their neighbours’ son had in fact been kidnapped, the mother was asked, "When did you give birth to him?" to which her reply was: "Oh, that’s quite a story. I never gave birth to him, I bought him."

Maayan Nahari

For four days they put me to sleep, I would so much as move my face to wake up, and they would immediately give me anesthesia







Four days later I asked, what did I bear? They told me a son. I asked, and where is he? Dead.

What do you mean dead? Dead how?

To this day, it hurts here (in my heart), what happened to this son