On August 26, about two weeks after the end of the second Lebanon War, Tayeer Bilal Muhassin, a handsome and swarthy 18-year-old, left Al-Najah University in Nablus for his home in Nakura. He calmly made his way on the familiar daily route up to the Beit Iba checkpoint. From there he hitched a ride to Kafr Dir Sharef, and again marched along the rocky hills, on a path that bypasses the Dir Sharef-Nakura road, which is closed to Palestinian traffic. This restriction on movement prolongs his way home by an hour, but he got used to that a long time ago.

The bypass route ends at the Shavei Shomrom road that leads to Mt. Gerizim, which is also closed to Palestinians. Muhassin usually crosses this road at a run, in order to reach the open areas on the other side, which lead to his village via routes full of obstacles. Only rarely does he encounter soldiers. Usually they ignore him. Sometimes they ask him for his ID card, detain him for half an hour and release him. Recently, surprise checkpoints have been cropping up on the road quite often, but even this exhausting routine no longer seems particularly threatening to him.

That afternoon there was an armored personnel carrier on the road with three soldiers: Sergeant H., Sergeant Y. and the driver. They stopped him and took away his ID card, ordering him to wait next to another "detainee" who was standing on the side, said Muhassin. "I didn't know the guy," he added, his dark face red, his look damp, defiant. "I asked him: 'Why are you here?'" He told me: 'They found a cassette of Nasrallah on me, they took it and destroyed it.'"

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Shortly afterward, continued Muhassin, a soldier approached him and demanded that he translate what was written on the cover of the cassette. The title "The Promise that was Kept" danced before his eyes. Muhassin stared at the cassette and said he didn't know. The owner of the cassette also insisted that he didn't know. The soldier got angry: "Okay, wait a minute," he said. He spoke in "Jews' Arabic." He approached the APC and returned with a stick in his hand. The owner of the cassette, who had already been beaten by him that day, fled for his life. "I didn't flee, I couldn't, they had my ID card, nor did I take in what was happening, they didn't have weapons, they didn't fire at him, they didn't even try to catch him, apparently it was enough for them that they had me."

From that moment on, according to Muhassin's testimony, he was exposed to cruelty and abuse for its own sake. Sergeant H. and Sergeant Y. dragged him to the APC, he says, placed plastic handcuffs on him and forced him to search for his escaped friend in the fields of thorns on the sides of the road. But after a short time they changed their minds, and without any advance warning began to hit and kick him.

"They blamed me for telling him to run," he said. "One of them threw me down and hit me on the head with a club. I tried to get up and they continued to beat me, with rhythmic beatings, cursing me: 'Shaheed, Hezbollah, Hamas.' I got up, I walked on the road, bent over, in pain, and they followed. One of them hit me on my head with a stick, I fainted, I was unconscious for about 10 minutes. After I woke up, I had just opened my eyes, I didn't even understand what was happening to me, I was beaten again and again."

A military vehicle that arrived by chance chased away the soldiers who were doing the beating. The soldier in the car reprimanded them, but when he disappeared, they started beating him again. "They told me: 'Stand,' I said: 'I can't,' and they dragged me impatiently, angry, and hit me with a stick until it broke. Blood was flowing on my shirt and on my face, and it didn't stop. The soldier said to me: 'Take off your shirt and wipe your head.' One of the soldiers asked me: 'Do you want water?' I said: 'Yes.' So he told me to get down on my knees and to turn my back to them and he brought a kind of iron rod from the vehicle and hit me, on my ear and on my head, and said to me: 'There's water for you.'"

Whenever Muhassin tried to get up, he was beaten, he says. He was thrown into a drainage ditch, and the two soldiers jumped in after him and continued beating him. When they heard the sound of an approaching military jeep from the direction of Shavei Shomron, they hid him in the armored car, stuffed a rag into his mouth and threatened him: "If you open your mouth, we'll kill you."

They drew a circle, according to his testimony, and ordered him to sit inside it. "If any part of your body goes out of the circle, you'll get beaten," they threatened. "They kept telling me: 'You're going to die here today,'" he said. They competed in raining blows down on him as though he were a punching bag. "One of them grabbed me and held me tight and the other came at a run and kicked me in the neck with his shoes. One soldier said to the other: 'Get out of the way,' and hit me with a stick. My cell phone rang. It was my cousin. The soldier cut off the conversation. 'You had a phone call from Hezbollah,' he yelled at me, and hit me on the head."

Eight complaints

The torture session continued for a long time, until at one arbitrary moment the soldiers decided to release him. "The soldiers blurred the signs of blood in the circle with their feet," he said. "When I started to walk they threw stones at me, and then, that was it. I decided to walk to my village, and if they threw stones, let them do what they wanted, halas, let them shoot, I didn't care." Muhassin arrived at the village covered with blood and his father took him to the hospital in Nablus. He needed stitches in his head.

When the abusive soldiers played with his cell phone, they unknowingly photographed themselves, and their pictures enabled the Military Police investigation unit to locate them. Muhassin's case is apparently the only one to be solved so far, out of eight complaints submitted last week to the Israel Defense Forces by the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, against soldiers for harassing Palestinians at the checkpoints since the outbreak of the recent Lebanon War. This week, indictments were filed in the regional military court against Sergeant H. and Sergeant Y. Euphemisms were used to describe details of the crime: The accused, while serving as soldiers in the IDF, behaved in a manner unbefitting their rank and status in the army. The Lebanon War, which grabbed all the public's attention for about a month, turned the West Bank into a gray area, prone to the fallout of shame, chauvinism and aggressive vengefulness from the IDF's inability to defeat Hezbollah.

Inadvertently, in a kind of unavoidable chain reaction triggered by the war in the north, the regime of travel restrictions in the territories was tightened - either as a result of the imposition of new rules or because the soldiers manning the checkpoints found themselves enforcing the existing restrictions more strictly. The surprise checkpoints multiplied.

A month and a half after the war, there are still signs of it. One day, there is a sweeping prohibition against Jenin residents moving from place to place; another day the residents of Nablus are targeted. Even Tul Karm, which is usually not blocked, is closed occasionally. One day the restriction applies to people aged 16-35, another day to those aged 18-30. Complaints of abuse by checkpoint soldiers have become more frequent. The stories of residents who bypassed the checkpoints via the fields, were caught and beaten - sometimes border on tales of semi-hysterical, hate-filled cruelty. The obsessive preoccupation of the soldiers' curses with Hezbollah and Nasrallah and virgins in Paradise speaks for itself.

"They failed with Hezbollah, so they took everything out on us, the weak ones, that's for sure," said Muawiya Hassan Musil, 36, a father of five and a cab driver in the Tul Karm area. He himself was a victim of abuse at the height of the Lebanon War. On July 23 he was detained, he says, at the Ramin checkpoint on his way from Tul Karm to Ramallah. All the passengers in the taxi were required to sit on the floor, their hands folded on their necks, but he was pulled out of the cab by a soldier who grabbed his shirt, and another two soldiers held his arms and dragged him behind the military jeep, far out of sight of the line of detainees at the checkpoint.

"One of the soldiers hit me in the stomach with the rifle butt, straight in the intestines, I held my stomach and went down to the floor and then I felt a strong blow to my shoulders," said Muawiya in simple Hebrew. "I don't know, it was a young soldier, about 20 or something, a boy, with glasses and a helmet. I couldn't believe it," he muttered with growing anger. "The other two kicked me in the ribs, everything went dark, I remained silent, I usually don't remain silent with soldiers, this was my first time, it's impossible to describe the fear, they didn't stop, they kept on beating me."

He still doesn't understand why they chose him, of all people, to harass. The soldiers turned to take care of the passengers who were sitting at the front of the checkpoint, and when they returned to him they accused him of pretending, of lying. "They wanted to talk to me, I couldn't, my eyes were all red, my whole body was full of blood," he said. "The soldier shouted at me: 'Liar, nothing hurts you,' and later, a soldier put his pistol to my forehead, but the other soldier stopped him and said to him: 'Forget it, we don't want to kill him.' In the end they understood that I really was in a bad state. Thank God there was a doctor in my cab, so they brought him. He said to the soldiers - 'If you don't take him away from here within five minutes, he'll die.'

'War in their genes'

"I don't know what they wanted from me," he says repeatedly. "They kept shouting at me: 'We've caught you, ya maniac, ya Hezbollah.' I don't know, maybe they thought I was a terrorist, they were hitting me all the time, I don't know, they went crazy, I don't understand it, they entered my house and now they're killing me, who will stop them from saying that I wanted to steal a weapon, we know the Jews, we know them well, they think that they can do anything, we live as in a prison, we want to live, we want to live in spite of everything, the Jews talk about peace, what peace, these people like blood, if someone checks their blood type he'll find war, these are people with war in their genes. Afterward they complain that there are terror attacks. Why? From the pressure we live under. If I can't bring bread or milk home, what should I do? There's no way, there's no way."

Akram Razi Nazial, 21, a native of Nakura, who is studying history at Al-Najah University, suffered a shocking attack. "If I come across the soldier who did that to me, even in another 20 years, I'll kill him," he hissed. His thin, quiet appearance did not mesh with the outbreaks of hatred and shame that gradually emerged from his words. He spoke about the Nazis, about Hitler who exterminated six million Jews, with demagogic simplicity, with increasing impatience. "I always felt sorry for the Jews, but now they themselves have done something to me that Hitler did to them," he commented. He is convinced that two of the four soldiers who abused him were sergeants H. and Y., who were indicted this week for abusing Tayeer Muhassin. He identified them from pictures taken by the cell phone and distributed in the village.

He was on his way from Nakura in the direction of Beit Saref accompanied by his cousin, Taher Abdul Nasser. Suddenly soldiers appeared from among the olive groves and shouted at him, "Come, ya maniac," they said. They took away their ID cards and sat them next to the trunk of an olive tree. "An hour later one of the soldiers called me aside," continued Nazial in a matter-of-fact tone. "He said to me, your mother is a slut, things I won't repeat, I'll do such and such to your sister, things like that, and then he said to me, 'You're Hamas.' I told him 'I'm not Hamas,' he said, 'Lift up your shirt; I did so, he started beating me on the chest."

"Afterward they told me 'Sit,'" continued Nazial, "they took a can of instant coffee that was half full, and spilled it on my head. Then they said to me: 'Take a cup and put it on your head,' the cup was empty and light, so the wind blew it off. Every time it fell he beat me again, and his friend was egging him on: 'Give it to him, give it to the slut.' Afterward, he had a phone conversation and told me to keep quiet. After he finished the conversation he started once again to curse my sister, Mohammed, Allah, whoever.

"Each time the cup fell I was beaten mercilessly, so I tried to stabilize it on my head. When I succeeded, the soldier said: 'Now quiet, quiet, don't move, keep quiet, you bastard.' He aimed his rifle and shot at the cup. The soldiers were rolling with laughter and they applauded. I saw the shot. The soldier was about four meters away. He apparently hit the mark, because the soldiers applauded. I thought it was the end of my life, it's indescribable, I couldn't believe I was still alive, if I were to meet that soldier today I would kill him, I don't care, let them kill me, you only die once."

Humiliation and abuse have become an inseparable part of the regime of checkpoints that is spreading in the territories. The IDF told B'Tselem that all the complaints would be investigated.