Last Tuesday, Doaa Abd al-Qadr, 14, left her home near Tul Karm and walked toward the separation fence. It was a spring day, her mother says, and she decided to visit relatives, Israeli Arabs who live on the other side. Doaa and a 12-year-old friend were walking in a ditch on the Palestinian side, about 100 meters from the fence, when Israel Defense Force soldiers spotted them and fired warning shots - as far as is known. When the two girls came out of the ditch, an IDF marksman fired another shot. Doaa Abd al-Qadr died on the way to the hospital.

The IDF responded harshly to the firing against orders; the marksman and his commander were suspended, and a military police investigation started. Urgency, however, did not typify the subsequent treatment of the mourning family. The custom of callousness to the suffering of the Palestinians is ingrained so deeply in the Israeli establishment that there was no basic human sensitivity that would have made it possible to treat the mourners in a manner concomitant with their suffering and with our guilt.

When it became clear that Doaa's father had been held for two months in the Abu Kabir lockup for entering Israel without a permit, his lawyer requested that he be released to attend his daughter's funeral. Although no one claimed that the father, Nasser Abd al-Qadr, was involved in terror activities or that his early release would harm the security of the state, the courts, in three instances, were not persuaded that it would be possible, beyond the letter of the law, to allow a man who had lost his daughter due to an IDF mistake to take part in mourning her death. For three days of excruciatingly complicated and unnecessary legal procedures, the father remained incarcerated. Concern that Abd al-Qadr, who was suspected of stealing a car, would not return from his mourning to prison, hardened the hearts of the judges.

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On Wednesday, half an hour before the funeral, Tel Aviv District Court Judge Zvi Gurfinkel said that the request to release the father had been submitted late and to the wrong court, and therefore rejected it. He did propose that a representative of the Prisons Authority escort the father to and from the funeral, but ignored the fact that the father was a resident of the territories and there was no one who could escort him to Tul Karm. On Thursday, Tel Aviv District Court Judge Noga Ohad refused to release the father, and High Court Justice Asher Grunis set another hearing for the following week, after the end of the mourning period. If attorney Rami Otman had not insisted on once more approaching the State Prosecutor's Office, and if MKs Zahava Gal-On and Ahmed Tibi had not agreed to sign a guarantee, the father would not have managed to get to the mourners' tent. On Friday evening, in a patrol car whose windows were blackened so the media would not, perish the thought, take advantage of the opportunity to talk to him, the father was released on bail at the Taibeh roadblock.

It is impossible to attribute the chain of callousness described above to this or that individual or even to this or that institution, but only to point out an ongoing process of brutalization with regard to the Palestinian person: the person who seeks a livelihood, the person in pain over his daughter, killed by our forces' fire, the one for whom even natural human empathy with his mourning is no longer natural to us.