This American Life - 865: The Other Territory

Episode Date: August 24, 2025

Since October 7th, while the world has focused its attention on Gaza, the Israeli government has tightened the screws on the three million Palestinians in the West Bank in all sorts of dramatic ways. We travel to the West Bank to see these changes in person. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: Ira commutes with Hamed, who has to navigate a constantly changing series of checkpoints and roadblocks to get to work every day. (13 minutes)Act One: Settler violence has worsened significantly in the West Bank since October 7, 2023. Yael Even-Or travels to a tiny village called Tuba, surrounded by Israeli settlements, to meet the 27-year-old resident trying to protect it. (26 minutes)Act 2: Two quick snapshots of life in the West Bank since October 7th. (6 minutes)Act Two: After October 7th, Israeli Minister of Security Itamar Ben-Gvir increased restrictions on Palestinian prisoners in Israeli security prisons. Prisoners started dying. Dana Chivvis looks into one of those deaths. (25 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.

A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, This AmericanLife.org. Hamit's got the vibe of a guy who can handle anything. A beefy Tony Soprano type, but without the menace. We're in this big white four-wheel drive pickup truck that he tools around in. Me and him and a producer, Sassan Khalifi. And Ahmed's task this morning requires ingenuity. His task?

He's got to get to work. Step one, get himself out of Hebron, the city where he lives. This is in the West Bank, so movement on the roads is controlled by the Israeli army. And every day the army changes which exits out of the city are open. So I checked on many groups which entrance is easy to go out. These are WhatsApp and telegram groups. Today they say that only two roads are open in and out of the city of a quarter million people who drive to one of them,

a handful of soldiers with assault rifles are manning a checkpoint. They open this door around six at morning. And we're third in line. There's a gate and soldiers are going through the cars. Yes. Also, most of the time,

you will stay here between 10 minutes until one hour. Today we're lucky. We're early, line's short, and they wave us through without stopping. After 7.30, Hamid says, he's up every car, and he gets really backed up. Hamad works for a company called Comet Me, that sets up solar power and internet and water systems

and Palestinian villages around the West Bank. So he spends a ton of time driving from place to place. And has had to become this kind of weird expert in a thousand details of checkpoints and closed roads and tricks to get around. That suits him. I'm the kind of person who likes to talk. talk to everyone, and learn everything and hear everything, he says. He struck his outfit with video cameras in case we have any kind of run-in with Israeli settlers

or the army. Haman's had frightening moments when soldiers pulled guns on him. 45 minutes into our drive, he pulls over and points to a winding road, the climbs of the side of a long, steep hill in the desert. It's easier to explain this in Arabic. So Sasson jumps in to translate. So we can see here from up the hill Way over there if you could see the road This is a container crossing

It's got the container crossing Apparently because a man used to have a little roadside stand I don't know what's shipping container there Now it's the notorious checkpoint That divides the north of the west bank and the south See over there you can see the queue of cars That means that they're just stopping every car to search the cars

And we can't see any cars moving I would choose to go to a street I would choose to go to alternative routes because we're going to get stuck there for a couple of hours. One possible alternative route is an unpaved road that curves away in the distance that Hamid points to. It doesn't like that option because it delivers you to another checkpoint. That could be an hour and a half wait. But I have another road. Less people, they know this road.

And do you think that's the best one to do? Yes. And I will save a lot of time. Okay, we just turned around and made a U-turn. Within minutes, we're off the highway, and speeding down a two-lane street, the houses close to neither side. The danger of this route, Haman says,

is that we're going to drive by an Israeli settlement where we can get pulled over for hours. Though he has a plan for that, there are people he knows nearby that he can claim that we're visiting if we're stopped. We pop out into a clearing, then turn down an unpaved, rocky, I don't even want to call this a road,

it's more like a ledge on the edge of a cliff. Hey, could I just pause just to say, like, this is, like, one of the worst roads I've ever driven on. The car is rocking, like, left and right as if we were on a stormy sea. And even to keep the car upright, you're having to, like, weave back and forth. Yeah, I can barely hold my coffee mong. At one point in this trip, we're on a bumpy, slow road, and Hamid points to an overpass with a freeway that is just for Israelis. Cars with Israeli plates whids by, they go through fewer checkpoints.

This whole unequal road system that's way faster for Israelis and we're harder for Palestinians. It's nothing new in the West Bank. But after October 7th, after the Hamas attack, where some 1,200 Israelis were killed and another 250 taken hostage, the worst attack in Israel's history, the Israeli government struck back not just in Gaza, where Hamas is based, where Israel's now killed over 60,000 people. They also took action in the West Bank, in all kinds of ways. Just one of them was that they installed hundreds of new checkpoints in roadbox.

From the highway, you see these yellow and orange gates that are locked shut, one after another, blocking off passage to Palestinian villages, isolating them. Sometimes you see people going around the gates and running across the highway to get everyday stuff done. If we pass one roadblock, it's a mound of rocks piled six or seven feet high in the middle of a street. Another is a big gate that Hamid points to and says that behind it is a community that is company, Comet provides services to. And in order for us to be able to get to our communities, we would have to drive, instead of five minutes to get to them from here, we would have to drive 35 minutes to 40 minutes because the gate now is closed.

And has this gate been closed permanently since October 7th? Yes. Our trip this morning ends up taking two and a half hours. We end up in a tiny village outside Jericho. Hamid says the checkpoints in roadbox added over an hour to the trip. His team is putting in water filtration and security cameras this particular day. And one of his co-workers was not as lucky on the roads. I'll call him Sam.

All these names are made up, by the way. They all worry about retaliation from the Israelis. Sam came to work in this village today from the north, which should have taken less than an hour. But because of a checkpoint, it took six. Six hours. Did they search your car? This is the point.

They didn't check anything. They just want you to suffer in the road. They don't do anything. But they just want to waste your time and humiliating. Just like that. They want to let us know that they are owning these roads. So what did you do for six hours? Do some more in my laptops.

Sometimes, sometimes watching the news. Sometimes nothing, just hear a song, some songs or something. The Israeli military categorically denies that it's using checkpoints and roadblocks to disrupt the lives of Palestinians. A spokesperson wrote to us that security forces operate, quote, under a complex security reality, where terrorists embed themselves within the civilian population. Accordingly, there are dynamic checkpoints

and ongoing efforts to monitor a movement. Said the military tries to maintain, quote, as much as possible, the routine of everyday lives. of the population of the area. Sam sees it differently. He described the feeling of helplessness that he gets, waiting for hours online at a checkpoint. In this way, they didn't totally get it first,

but let me share this with you. He says it feels like your hand or some other piece of your body has been cut off, and it's lying on the ground in front of you, and you see it there, and you can't do anything about it. And you must say it's okay.

You must say it's okay because you can't do something about that. It's an occupation. It's an occupation, he's saying. So much has gotten worse in the West Bank since October 7th for Palestinians. More violent, more than driven off their land. The Israeli government has done things to choke the economy. Unemployment has soared.

There's been a wave of people arrested and imprisoned, but no charges and no trials. I'm starting today's program talking about, about roadblocks and checkpoints. Because when I talked to people around the West Bank about what feels different since October 7, so many people pointed to just this everyday stuff. Like the difficulty of getting from place to place

has gotten harder. As Hamid put it. You can't predict anything, so you're constantly under pressure. There's stress around you all the time. It squeezes on your life, Hamad says. stresses him out. When he goes to the doctor these days, his blood pressure is higher than in the past. He gets mad about little stuff. He knows he's overreacting. We're going to spend today's

whole show in the West Bank, and I think I should pause now just so everybody is on the same page about what the West Bank is. Okay? So if you picture Israel, it's a country roughly the size and shape of New Jersey. Gaza, when the Gaza War has been happening, a little strip of land carved out in the West. Two million Palestinians live there. roughly. Three million Palestinians live in the West Bank. It is a much, much bigger chunk of land on the East Side. Okay, I know. East Side, West Bank. It's called the West Bank because it runs along the West Bank of the Jordan River. Israel took over the West Bank in Gaza in a war in 1967 and put them under military occupation until it figured out whether it was going to make

that land part of Israel or give it to the Palestinian people in exchange for peace. If the Palestinian people were ever going to get their own state, the West Bank would probably be the heart of it. Is that with me? All right, so trying to understand what was happening out in the West Bank, there's this kind of remarkable document that I learned about. It was written by the Israeli government minister who was called the Overlord of the West Bank by one Israeli publication

because basically he calls the shots there for the current government. His name is Spitzalo Smoltrich. And before he got this job, back in 2017, when he was a member of the Israeli parliament. He published a manifesto, his title roughly translates to the decisive plan, in which he argues that as long as Palestinians continue to hope for their own homeland,

the conflict between Jews and Palestinians is going to continue forever. They'll always be at war. And so he says, Israel's first goal should be to destroy hope, destroy Palestinians' hopes of ever getting their own state or homeland. He says Israel can do that by claiming more land and building more homes for Jews by changing the facts on the ground. Until, for Palestinians, quote, the point will come when frustration will cross to the threshold of despair

and will lead to acceptance and understanding that their cause stands no chance. It simply isn't going to happen. At that point, he says, Israel should offer them a choice. Leave and go elsewhere or stay, the second-class residence, not full citizens. In Israel will be a Jewish state, quote, from the river to the sea. Smotrich turned down a request for an interview. But in the last two weeks, he made international headlines

describing his current intentions for the West Bank. He was in an Israeli settlement, outdoors, at a podium, announcing that Israel was going to be building thousands of new homes in the West Bank, in a spot that would effectively split the West Bank in half. The line that made international headlines was when Smotritch said, this reality completely buries the idea of a Palestinian state. In the last few weeks,

France, Britain, Australia, and Canada have announced their intention to possibly recognize a Palestinian state, and Smotritch addressed those countries directly in a speech in terms that echoed his decisive plan. He's saying anybody who tries to recognize a Palestinian state today in the world will receive our answer on the ground. Not in documents, not in decisions or statements, but in facts. Facts of houses, facts of neighborhoods, roads, and more and more Jewish families that build lives.

Today on our show, we go to the West Bank. I think the horror of what has been happening in Gaza, has taken up so much of our attention, but lots of us, me included, haven't really taken in the dramatic changes in the West Bank since October 7th, in settlements, in violence, in daily life, under Minister Smotrich and the current government. Israel's actions right now in the West Bank seem to have two goals, to crush the idea that a Palestinian state will ever be there, and, as Smokritzsche wrote in 2017,

to drive Palestinians to cross the threshold of despair, When he wrote that, he was talking about building Israeli settlements, but I think I might also describe lots of things that have been happening lately. Some of the details of this really surprised me. I'm guessing they might surprise you, too. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. This message comes from Wise, the app for using the...

money around the globe. When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit Wise.com. T's and C's Apply. This American Life for a show today about the West Bank, Act 1, Ali and the Duster. So the current Israeli government took power about a year before October 7th. And from the start, it's been aggressively on the side of helping Jewish settlers build more homes and take more territory. in the West Bank. Minister Smachritch talks about this proudly, how they've approved record numbers of new homes

for Israelis there. All these settlements are seen as illegal under international law by most of the international community. But as part of that expansion, settlers have been pushing Palestinians off their land in the West Bank in record numbers. A group in Israel that monitors settlement expansion,

Peace Now Settlement Watch Project, says that since October 7th, settlers have pushed more than 80 Palestinian communities off their land. Before October 7th, settlers had only done that six times. And there's way more violence now against Palestinians in the West Bank

by the Israeli military and Israeli settlers since October 7th. And way more Palestinians killed than in the past. Khagit O'Fran, the co-director of Settlement Watch, described Israel's attitude since October 7th this way.

Everything can be justified because look what they did to us. Look how dangerous they are. But I think also the feeling of settlers now that they are in charge. They have no limits. They have their back covered by this government. They can do whatever they want. Nobody's going to hurt them.

That's a big change. One of the producers of today's show is an Israeli journalist, Gail Evan R. She was interested in what it's like for these Palestinian communities, coming under all this increased pressure to leave. And she was calling around, talking to lots of people, until somebody said to her, you know who you should call about this? Ali Awad.

Ali's 27. He was in a tiny village called Tuba, one of 19 villages in an area called Masafar Yata, where they filmed that movie No Other Land that won the Oscar this year, and where the intimidation and harassment has been intense. Ali had been studying for his master's in English, who wanted to be a college English teacher.

but instead he's become kind of the protector of his little village. Yael talked to him over months as he had to deal with an escalating series of events that really demonstrate how things are changing in lots of parts of the West Bank. Here's Yael. When I first talked to Ali, back in November, the main thing he was doing all day was driving people around.

To their doctor's appointments, family gatherings, the police station. He has the only car in Tuba. one car for 80 people. I am every day available, like 24-7, all the month. And how do you manage your calendar schedule? Do you write it down somewhere if someone says, I need to go there on Sunday? Yeah.

I have a group in my WhatsApp called Talk to Myself, which is only myself in this. So I check it every evening to see what tomorrow I'm up to. Ali's car is important to Tuba because the village is totally isolated. There's only one road in and out. Tuba is way up on a hill and the road is rocky. Valleys right below you. He requires a skilled driver and an SUV.

But what probably makes it hardest to go in and out of Tuba are the settlements. They surround Tuba on three sides and cut it off from the rest of the Palestinian villages nearby. The Palestinians can't walk or drive through them, so Ali drives everyone up and down the rocky hill. Hill. He told me he's the taxi driver, the grocery delivery guy, and the ambulance driver, all combined. One of the first things you see when you get to Tuba are the animals. Ali's family are shepherds. He gave me a tour. There are camels, chickens, goats, and hundreds

of sheep. It's the time for them to start getting fertilized for the first time. how do they get fertilized as you said naturally they just hook up yes they just hook up and but like we have kind of a medicine hormones that will motivate the appetite I was waiting to see what words are you going to use for this to motivate the appetite is a key word it's it's good enough for public radio I think yeah Ali's telling his cousin Jude, who's nine, to get off the tractor. Here's the other thing you'd see in Tuba right away. Besides the animals, it's Israel's flag,

which feels completely out of place overlooking this Palestinian village. It's at the top of the hill, just above Ali's family's compound. Ali thinks it was placed there by settlers from the nearby outpost, Chavatmaon. Right after October 7th, they build a road from the outpost to the top of the hill. And they put this flag, you see, 200 meters from here. If I get there, I will be arrested. The flag hovers over Tuba.

A reminder from the settlers, day and night, we're right here. One of the first problems that cropped up after October 7th that kept Ali and his car busy was how to get kids to school. For 19 years, the kids from Tuba had the Israeli military escort them as they walked to school, sometimes with an armored military vehicle. Because to get to school,

they had to walk through Havatmaon, the outpost, and the settlers would attack them on their way, throw rocks at them. It happened to Ali when he was a kid. I actually found some footage of him in an old Al Jazeera story. Ali was 17 at the time. Sometimes they throw rocks,

a lot of rocks, a lot of rocks, as rainfalling. After October 7th, the military refused to escort the kids anymore. The military told us that this decision was due to a lack of manpower and for security reasons. So Ali added to his list,

school bus driver. He started driving the kids, as many as 14 of them. They'd all tried to cram in. Sometimes it would take two trips. What do the kids talk about in the car? Sometimes about Ken. these, sometimes about homeworks.

Ali now knows a bunch of not very important secrets, he tells me. The school is actually pretty close by, about 1.5 miles. But he has to take this long way around because he can't go near the outpost. The round trip takes him a little over an hour. That's the nature of the occupation in the West Bank. It makes the Palestinians constantly work harder to get back to the thing that was normal. a second ago, even though it wasn't even normal in the first place. The house alley shares with his uncle and aunt is on a little rise.

His room doesn't have much on the walls. He's not big on decorations. There are only two photos. Both of them are of his car. One is a total glam shot of the car at the car wash. I took this picture and sent to my mom because he, You know, here, the car gets very dusty. And she was always telling me, like, you need also to clean the car sometimes.

So I said to her photo showing how clean the car could be. Can I just say, the way you took this picture, I'm getting the thing that you're very proud of this car. Yeah, you can see. You know, like, some people also use the pronoun it for the car. I use the pronoun she for her. And people would say you are in a relationship with this car. Ali bought her after the first car he got broke on the highway one day. Not to name names, but it was a Kia Sportage.

This one is much better, a Romanian car, a duchy a duster. An SUV, his is white. If cars had faces, I'd say this one is frowning. Ali keeps it in top shape, so it never breaks down near a settlement and can always get out of a dangerous situation quickly. He spends nearly all of his money on it. I don't have kids. I don't have my own kids.

I don't have, like, other expenses than my cigarettes and my car, you know? You know, like spending all your life, your energy, your money on the car is to, as a driver, to make sure that everyone in your car, in the journey, is safe as... The thing is, it's not just Palestinians in the area who know the duchy duster. Some settlers know it too. In January, three months after October 7th, Ali was driving his neighbor. They were on the highway. Suddenly, another driver threw a glass bottle at them.

It shattered the mirror. It was very scary. Ali thinks it might have been a nearby settler who recognized his car. The neighbor told Ali he should drive less, keep a low profile. But Ali kept on driving. The first settlers near Tuba set up shop in 1981. Today, about 550 people live there. The settlements called Ma'on.

They have schools, a library, youth club. Twenty years later, an outpost, Chavat Ma'an, was established nearby. It's illegal under Israeli law. And nearly 20 years after that, Chavat Ma'an sprung its own illegal outpost. called Mann Farm, after the local settler leader who started it, Isasshahman. This newer outpost is a sheep farm and a sort of Airbnb-type setup with a campsite as well. It has 106 Google reviews with an average of 4.9 stars. Ali has known Issaqa Man since he was a kid.

He remembers him harassing them on their way to school. And nowadays, he sees him around too by his says at least once a week. We reached out to Issa's Khaman for comment, but did not hear back. His wife told us he had no interest in speaking. Before October 7th, the settlers would mainly mess with the Palestinians when they got close to the settlements. Since October 7th, the settlers are closing in on the residence of Tuba, and even entering the village. Ali told me and my producer Dana about a day last summer. It was around eight, half past eight in the morning or nine.

My uncle was greased like 300 sheep under his house, like where we are sitting 200 meters under us. This valley right below us, just below? The bottom of this valley just below us. And suddenly he saw like four masked settlers. Four settlers wearing masks. In the middle of his flock. Two started like to run towards him, to scare him, and in the same time two start to take the ship to the settlement.

How many did they get? They took everything. All the sheep? All the sheep. They start to run with the sheep and his wife and himself, like, we're screaming at me. Like, the settlers took everything we have and come help us. So Ali comes running and starts recording on his phone. Halfway up a big hill, he finds them.

At the start of the video, you see two men. They're young, wearing masks. They both have large sticks in their hands. One has a rock as well. They're threatening his aunt. Ali is pleading with them in Hebrew. Stop. Stop. Put down the rock.

The men yelled at Ali to go home. When he starts running back, they chase him. But then, something surprising happens. While they were attacking us, for a couple of minutes, our sheep ran back to our house. Like to the direction of our house. out of their hands, out of their control. Ali's proud when he tells the story

because it was a rare victory. 300 sheep saved. Sheep theft has become an increasingly common phenomenon in the West Bank. A lot of times, people don't get them back, which means losing their entire livelihood. Ali says 300 sheep are worth roughly $125,000. I've seen even higher estimates.

Ali doesn't really sleep at night anymore, thanks to the constant threats from settlers and his own hyper-vigilance. So he stays up most of the night and keeps watch over the village. He started doing this a few months before October 7th. But after, he got even more anxious. The government handed out weapons in settlements, at least 3,000 of them, in the first two weeks of the war. They also gave ATVs to settlers near Tuba.

And a lot more settlers began walking around in military. uniforms. I called Ali while he was up one night. He was in his room, sitting on his couch, getting up to go to the door every few minutes, where he had a good view of the family compound. He was drinking tea and smoking. How many cigarettes do you usually go through?

In the night? Yeah. Yeah, between seven to ten. You don't smoke, right? I stopped. I quit. Great. Yes.

when I was a little older than you, I quit. So you have some time. But you should quit. Sometimes it's quiet. Nothing happens. Other nights it's not. Just right now, while I'm talking with you, I hear outside of my home that a settler on APB

just passed through our villages. Wow. So there are settlers there now? Yes. Like outside of my door, there is a settler right now. No reason for the settlers to pass through Tuba. They have much better roads on the other side of their outposts. Sometimes Ali shines a big flashlight at them as they drive by,

so they know he's there keeping an eye out. After a few months of taking the kids to school, Ali found a different arrangement for them, and then spent a lot of his time driving people to the police station, to file complaints after altercations with settlers. But Ali doesn't have much hope that the police will help them. In the last two decades, 94% of settler violence investigations ended without charges, according to Human Rights Organization Yashdin.

Still, Ali goes to the police because he wants to have a record of everything, in case they end up in court in the future. Things got so bad in the West Bank after October 7th, that in 2024, for the first time, the United States imposed sanctions on individuals and entities there. Issa's Rauman, the settler leader who started the nearby shepherding outposts, caught the attention of the Biden administration. They placed sanctions on him and on his outposts. Sanctions can make it really hard to use credit cards or banks. But in January, Donald Trump took office, and the same day, he decided to call off all sanctions on West Bank settlements and individuals.

We don't know if that's why, but after that, settler violence intensified in Masafriata, where Tuba is. And my next call with Ali, less than a week later, was different than all the others. Hello, hello. Aye. Can you hear me? Can you hear me well? I'd seen online that something big had happened in his village. So I was sitting in the car and I was drinking tea and I was waiting for a call.

Then suddenly I saw them six most settlers running toward me. I saw them running from above the hill down, like, you know, like that, you feel that it's like a storm. Like what I remember is like a sandstorm or whatever coming very fast towards us. Ali gets out of his car. The parking area is in the middle of the compound. His family was all around, his uncle, his grandma, his little cousins. He started screaming, telling them to run away. He was afraid the masked men were going to hurt them.

But he had another fear. The car. They're going to destroy the duster. So, after warning everyone, he went back to the car. But when he got back to the car, he saw the attackers were already there. One, he said, had an M-16, and the other, a bottle of gasoline. He gave up, ran in the other direction to join his family, and started filming. In the video, the sheep are running. Someone is throwing rocks in the direction of the attackers.

We see smoke, flames, things break. Ali realizes his little cousins, Julie and Jude, ages 7 and 9, are still in the house next to the fire. He yells at them to come out. He yells at his family and neighbors to get away from the attackers. The attack, the money-mauwad. The man-mauwad, I've got to do. I'd go, Argeo.

The attackers, apparently done with what they wanted to do, run off. Just five minutes have passed. Ali goes back to the parking area, and we finally see the car in the video. Huge flames fill the interior and pour out of all the windows. Ali and I talked on Zoom two days after that happened.

I mean, luckily, I'm still alive, not being burned inside the car. So that's still a huge miracle and something to be thankful about. How are your cousins doing now after this attack? Still very traumatized. Ali said that the attackers went into the house where the kids were. They didn't have time to escape. The attackers hit Julie with a rock on her back and Jude with a stick on his elbow.

Either they are not sharing, but I was, when I was in their age, I was not saying anything to anyone, but I remember how much I am scared. You know, like when I was six, I used to go to school, entering inside, Chaffat Mahon, and facing the most brutal attacks

on my way to school and I wanted to convince my parents not to go to school because of how much I was scared so for sure this is what the children are feeling

why didn't you say anything when you were a kid? I don't know like yeah you know what would be like the results of sharing. That's what I remember, that even if I share, there is nobody that is actually able to end this, like, reality.

The second photo in Ali's room, it's the image of the car burning. The top part of the car is all fire, the bottom is charred, smoke billows off to the very blue sky. The car was so important to Ali, to Tuba, that I was sure he would already have a plan to replace it. But he was paralyzed. The ability of getting another vehicle is not the most difficult part. The most difficult part is

what will be the fate of a new car. Yeah. This is the most devastating part. This is like the part that, like saying to me don't get another car because if they burn this one, they might burn the other one. So if they can do that at 2 p.m., like not at midnight or not at 2 a.m., if they can do it at 2 p.m., then this is a very scary situation. The police came to Tuba the same day to investigate. They sent a specialist to try to collect evidence. They took some rocks, looked for fingerprints in the car.

But Ali says they didn't find anything. Two teenagers from Chavat Mon were arrested, but they were released less than a week later. Ali heard the case had been closed. So many cars have been set on fire in recent years in the West Bank that a big Palestinian insurance company has started to offer settler attack insurance. They put out an ad with.

with a picture of a car burning intensely. After the Zoom call, I didn't hear from Ali. For weeks, he stopped answering my texts. He was silent on social media. Finally, he resurfaced. Sorry for my silence, he texted. I hope you're all right. Turned out, a few days after a call, he had been arrested.

He was released the same day, never charged, but the police kept his phone. I reached out to the police about this and about the car attack and never heard back. Ali felt like so much had been taken away from him. His car, his documents, which he kept in his car, his phone. Everything was gone in just five days. Like, everything, everything.

He got depressed and did something that no one here remembers him doing before. He took off, left Tuba for about a week and went to stay with the first. friend. His aunt, Aisha, told us that he never leaves. He's always there, ready to protect them. But Ali was the most scared he's ever been. He needed a beat to be alone, to recover. Life in Tuba was always a struggle with the settlers around. But Ali says that since October 7th, it feels like they're pushing towards a specific goal. They are working to kick the Palestinians out of their homes. This is what their message is.

like live from here, the government, the Israeli occupation government, is preventing us from building houses, from building schools, from building any kind of medical or educational units, building roads. They are preventing us from surviving, and we survive with whatever we can. The settlers would say, if this is not enough to make you leave this land, we will do it with shooting, with, like making your life hell. And what's your message back?

I'm trying to push me out of here. I didn't even decide to fuck live here. I wouldn't even choose to come to my safariata between, I don't know, Valdanio or Vicenza or Padova. These are names of Italian towns. Ali loves Italy. But he's from Tuba.

His family has lived there for generations. It's my home. I was born here. Are you blaming me for something I ended up in? In June, settlers injured more Palestinians in the West Bank than they have in any other month over the past two decades, according to the UN. About a month ago, a friend of Ali's was shot and killed by a settler in a neighboring village.

Ali's friend was filming a clash between the settler and some Palestinian residents, so it's all on video. The shooter claimed self-defense. He was arrested, but was released after a few days. At least 11 Palestinians were also arrested, including Ali, who wasn't even there. Back when I visited Ali, in April, he told me he'd made a decision about the car. He was going to fix the duster, which seemed impossible to me. But then, in June, I called him.

Hello, hello. Hi, Ali. Hi, A.L. How are you? I'm good. Now the car is fixed and it's already packed in Tuba, parked here. Wow. He sent a photo.

The Dachia Duster was back. Yail Evinor. Coming out of. an Israeli doctor tries to make sense of a case that does not make sense. That's in a minute from Chicago Bubble Radio, when our program continues. It's this American life of Myra Glass. Today's show, The Other Territory, we're looking at what's been happening in the West Bank while the world's attention has been on Gaza.

And before we turn to Act 2, there are two quick snapshots that I want to share with you of life in the West Bank since October 7th. Here's the first. It's a hall in a municipal park, a place where normally you would have a wedding or some other celebration. There's 16 families were living. Matt's on the floor where they sleep.

This room that you see here, this single room, 40 people sleep in it. There are no secrets. We change in front of each other. We sleep facing each other. There are no beds. That's no al-Maha.

Hamid Mahmoud Hekow, 31, a single mother with two daughters. She spoke with journalist Ahmed al-Baz. The while I was here because of something new that the Israeli army started doing in the West Bank in January, the country's defense minister announced that month that the military was going to start using the tactics that they've been using in Gaza, to level houses, the neighborhoods.

But now they were going to do that in the West Bank. And so Operation Iron Wall attacked four Palestinian refugee camps that are basically cities with tanks, and airstrikes and bulldozers tearing up the roads and knocking down buildings, displacing at least 30,000 people, according to the United Nations. It's unclear when or if they'll ever be able to move back. When we'll talk to Ahmed, the Israeli military just published a map indicating what houses they were going to demolish next.

Yeah, I saw it. That's my parents' home. They're threatening my parents' home with demolition. Yes, they're on it. They have a circle around it. On my parents' home, they have two dots on it. They're threatening demolition. I live in my parents' home in a room.

For us, the camp is our entire life. Okay, here's a second snapshot. This one? A bright, shiny car dealership. Chaka block with shiny new cars. So I'm looking around the showroom, two-floor showroom, and I don't see any customers.

We have one. Wait, who's the customer? Downstairs. That man. Abu Sleiman? Abu Sleman. He's the customer, yes. Abdullah Al-Nacha is the showroom manager for Al-Sahram Motors in the city of Hebron.

This is a family business with a car lot, car repair, gas station, and a kerfow here, French dry factory. And this is something I didn't really understand before I visited the West Bank, is just what a disaster its economy is right now. for a bunch of reasons. But one of the big ones is that roughly 120,000 Palestinians used to commute from the West Bank into Israel. And after October 7th, the Israeli government forbade most of them from doing that, saying it was for security reasons, even though Israel's own security services,

Shinbet said the risk could be managed. Shimbab, in fact, said it would be riskier to leave so many people unemployed and discontent. But those tens of thousands of commuters, They're not just a backbone of the Palestinian economy. They were Abdullah's customers. They buy cars, new cars, or they buy lands, or they buy many things. And since the 7th of October, they all unemployed.

People can't make their car payments, and the dealership's been repossessing vehicles. They've gone from selling 560 cars a year to 175. They've let a third of their employees go in all their businesses. This bit also surprised me post-October 7th. They say Israeli companies decided to stop selling them potatoes for the French Rye factory. Abdallah also says that the local Palestinian government in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority, owes them $6 million for construction and agricultural equipment that have bought. How soon do you think you'll get paid?

They send like each month around $20,000, $20,000 each month. Yes. Well, that just barely covers the interest. It doesn't cover the interest. Why can't they pay? They can't pay because they don't have money. Palestinian Authority doesn't have money, in part because the Israeli government has withheld

hundreds of millions of dollars and tax revenues from it. A World Bank report in June described its finances as a fiscal crisis. But because they were the only local buyers for this kind of year, Abdullah continues to sell to them. They still buy equipment now, yes. And so how much does that thing cost? Each equipment, around $140,000. And how much do they put down?

How much do they pay when they buy? 30%. No, nothing, zero. What? Zero. How do I get that deal? You have to be a Palestinian authority, or one of them. Yes.

This is the kind of family business where once a week, they play volleyball together. It's brothers and cousins and Abdullah's uncle's managing this business. And when he asked Abdullah's cousin, Wajdi, how this has affected him personally, how hard it's been, keeping the business going. He said that for the first time in his life,

he's thought about moving away for a little bit. Until this war finished, to go abroad. Have you told your brother you've had these thoughts? Yes. What's he say? Shut up. Think about your business here, and my family as well.

Every person I talked to in the West Bank, seems stressed out about money. People with jobs are supporting people who lost jobs. Meanwhile, prices for food and gas are rising. The only business I ran across that seemed to be doing okay is this guy, Bilau. He sells this incredible corn that is covered in brightly colored powders and sauces,

including there's a TikTok-ready fluorescent teal sauce from a stand on the street. He's saying that ever since October 7th, people are just sitting around without work, not doing anything. And they wander around the streets, and corn, they can afford. His business has improved. Act 2, what happened to Wal-Weed? Since October 7th, there have been a ton of arrests in the West.

Bank, doubling the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Now it's over 10,000 people, according to the Israeli government. They're held as security prisoners, not on normal criminal charges, most are from the West Bank. Over 3,600 are in something called administrative detention, where they're not charged with anything, and there's no trial. They're just held, based on classified evidence they don't see and can't contest. Israeli prisons were notoriously overcrowded, even before October 7th. But in general, not many Palestinians died in Israeli prisons.

In the year before October 7th, it was two Palestinians, according to positions for human rights, Israel. Since October 7th, the count at least 93 Palestinians who died in Israeli custody. Nagy Abbas works for positions for human rights. It says after October 7th, it started to be weird because every week, every two weeks, you are getting a call saying, There is a new death. So what is happening in these prisons? Well, in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel, Israel's Minister of National Security, a far-right politician named Itamar Ben-Gavir, enacted some changes to the prison system.

Ben-Gavir is a long-time provocateur and ultra-nationalist, somebody who's been convicted of supporting a Jewish terrorist organization and incitement to racism. After the Hamas attacks, Ben-Gavir drastically limited security prisoners' contact with the outside world. It didn't matter whether they were accused of any connection to the Hamas attacks or Hamas itself. Families can't visit anymore. They can't call. The Red Cross, which had monitored conditions inside Israeli prisons since 1967, is now barred. In public statements, Ben-Givir refers to all Palestinian security prisoners as terrorists. The physical conditions inside prisons have gotten a lot worse, too. Skaby's infestations are rampant that have been for over a year. I didn't know this.

Eskabies is a contagious skin disease caused by mites. Prisoners tell their lawyers that a dozen people are sometimes crammed into a cell meant for five or six. And Vancouver reduced prisoners' food rations to the minimum allowable by Israeli law. Close the canteens where prisoners could buy their own food. Vancouver didn't try to hide any of this. Last July, he posted on X, quote, Since I assumed the position of Minister of National Security, one of the highest goals I have set for myself is to worsen the conditions.

of the terrorists in the prisons and to reduce their rights to the minimum required by law. He told the Associated Press that the purpose of these changes was to deter terrorism. Again, here's Najee Abbas of Physicians for Human Rights.

By the Israeli law, the punishment for an offense or a crime or when you are charged with something, the punishment is limiting your freedom, taking your freedom of movement. That is the punishment. But Bangvir, he was very clear from the day one in the office that he think that the conditions of the detention, not the detention itself.

The conditions of the detention should be part of the punishment. Palestinian prisoners began dying, many of them not very old, in the 40s, 30s, 20s. We don't know what happened to most of them. There have been a few autopsies that physicians for human rights knows about, but even the families of the prisoners who get autopsies almost never get an autopsy report. Here's what they get instead. They're allowed to send a doctor to observe the post-mortem examination

on their behalf. This doctor doesn't actually participate in the autopsy. They just watch the procedure, and then afterwards write up an account, just a page or two, about what they saw. And since October 7th, their observations, these written reports, have become one of the only windows

into what is happening to security prisoners inside Israeli prisons today. Dan Chavez has the story of one of those accounts. The place where these autopsies are performed is called Abu Kabir. It's in Tel Aviv. It's the Israeli government's Forensic Medicine Institute. Since October 7th, courts have dictated that only Israeli doctors can attend autopsies on behalf of the families. So physicians for human rights went in search of Israeli doctors

who'd be willing to go on behalf of Palestinian families. One of the people they called was Dr. Daniel Solomon, an Israeli physician, born in Italy. He's on the board of Physicians for Human Rights, volunteers with their mobile medical clinic in the West Bank, do-gooder kind of guy. Daniel had never been to an autopsy before. He's a surgeon, not a forensic pathologist. Those are the doctors specially trained to do autopsies. But Daniel said, sure, he'd go. He didn't have much time to prepare. I looked a bit online on how an autopsy is performed and how maybe a report can look like and that was it.

Daniel had also never been inside Abu Kabir, the Forensic Institute, though he'd jog by it a bunch. The first time Daniel went, it was only three weeks after the Hamas attacks on October 7th. The staff at Abu Kabir was still processing the remains of Israelis who had been killed. In a different room, down the hall,

Daniel observed the autopsies of two Palestinian prisoners that day. Over the course of the next year, he went to five of these autopsies. All Palestinian men from the West Bank who had died in Israeli prisons. After each one, Daniel wrote up his observations. One had, quote, multiple signs of physical assault and injury. Another had a relatively recent head trauma. Daniel saw conditions he assessed as treatable. One man's lungs were in the worst shape Daniel had ever seen.

one of the lungs was surrounded by pus and completely collapsed. He was 23. Daniel's view was that based on the condition of the lungs, the man would have been coughing violently and noticeably for at least a week. Daniel's used to seeing bodies inside and out. He's a surgeon. Standing there observing during the autopsies, taking notes, he kept a practiced emotional distance from the body,

same as he does when he's in surgery. And then, this March, there was a relief. Ahmed 17 years old. Daniel had read about Walid's death in the news. It made international headlines, the first Palestinian teenager to die inside an Israeli prison since Israel took over the West Bank in 1967, according to Physicians for Human Rights. Willid was from the West Bank, a town called Silwad. Palestinian officials told reporters he had fallen and hit his head, citing other prisoners' accounts. When Daniel got to Abu Kabir for Walid's autopsy, The staff there did something they'd never done on any of his previous visits.

They warned him about what he was about to see. They were telling me, like, they were commenting before he came in to kind of, like, get ready. He doesn't look good. The moment they placed his body on the autopsy table, I understood that I was dealing with something, and that I was not actually prepared to witness. The way he looked, it's hard to describe. It was difficult for me to even call it malnutrition.

This is how starvation looks like. I think the only thing that comes close to that, in my opinion, is really those pictures of the Holocaust. That's how bad it was. I deal with cancer patients. I deal, like, I've seen anorexia. I've seen people get as thin as it gets. I honestly have never seen someone looking like he did.

This interview was several months ago, before photos of starvation in Gaza were widespread. In the news stories about Walid, there was a photo of him from right before he was arrested. Walid looks like a strapping teenage boy, dirty blonde hair, the beginnings of a beard. He's fit, a soccer star, hoping to join the Palestinian national team. Nothing at all like the body Daniel was seeing on the,

the metal table in front of him? It's just like two absolutely different persons. I mean, it was really beyond recognition. Again, Daniel's account is not an official autopsy report. He doesn't have access to additional information. For instance, tests done on Walid's body after the autopsy. He doesn't know for sure how O'Leed got to look the way he did at the end. But his assessment is that however it happened.

Starvation at the end of the day killed him because he exposed him so much to other diseases that might have been treatable and that in his case just become fatal. Daniel addressed his account of the autopsy, quote, to the family of Walid Ahmed. Malide was a case where, in Daniel's view, everything he was seeing could have been treated. His significant weight loss, also scabies. Daniel's account also said Walid had an inflammation of the colon.

He did not see any evidence of a head injury, external or internal. Walid's body had been sent to Abu Kabir with notes from the prison medical clinic. Daniel read them and wrote in his account that in December, Walid had gone to the prison medical clinic and, quote, mentioned that he did not have access to sufficient amounts of food. Daniel said that, according to the prison notes, Waleed had said other prisoners were taking his food. The month before Waleed died, he went to the clinic two more times.

Israeli law says that, quote, a prisoner shall be entitled to the medical care necessary to maintain his health and to appropriate monitoring conditions as stipulated by an IPS physician. IPS's Israel Prison Service. The relevant thing is that he was someone who was under the responsibility of the Israeli Prison Service. He was under a system that failed him so badly. The Israel Prison Service told me it doesn't comment on individual cases. But they sent a statement saying, in part, quote,

All inmates are held according to legal procedures and their basic rights, including access to medical care, are upheld by professional. trained staff, subject to internal and external review. It took Daniel a couple of days to write his account. Just because I wanted it to be accurate, and sometimes it's really not that easy to find the wording, like somewhere in between something that a physician can understand, but something that also the family can understand. Daniel's account, with his observations, went to Waleed's father, Khalid.

Until he got it, he didn't know anything about how his son died, or why. He says he just got a call one night, close to midnight, telling him Waleed was dead. Khaled is the only one in the family who read all of Daniel's report. He said Waleed's mother, siblings, and aunts couldn't bear to finish it. Before receiving the report, knowing that Waleed was in good health, my first thought was it was a result of torture. or beating. I sought help from a doctor here in town and he explained to me the entire report, like for medical terms.

He explained all the details and all the different small parts in it. That was, it just, it just made it more shocking. I mean, my son, was an athletic young man. I don't know what they did to him in prison. Walid, Khalid, said, had cared how he looked, showered twice a day. In photos, he's always dressed nicely,

usually in name brands, he'll figure, polo. Walid liked things that were for clothes. He liked the nicest things. He wanted the nicest, best things. He did not use to ask, of course, but I knew what he liked. When he would go out to buy clothes, I knew his taste. He liked everything to be neat. Walid was planning to go to university next year.

To study finance and banking, Khaled told me. Some nights after school, and over the summer break, he worked at Hollid's shop. Hollid's mother was Brazilian. He imports nuts and coffee from Brazil and elsewhere. Waleed was a senior in high school. From what I can see, his social media is filled with photos of him and his friends, often preening, often in front of cars,

mixed in with memorial posts for young men who have died and support for others who are in prison. In a couple photos, people are holding guns. From the outside, it's hard to tell what any of that adds up to. But I showed all this to a Palestinian journalist who said he's seen hundreds of accounts like this. Walid had never been arrested before, his lawyers say. The military came in the middle of the night last September, 2024. Middle of the night reads are the standard way the military arrests Palestinians in the West Bank, including minors.

That was true even before October 7th. But there have been so many more arrests since then. Khaled says everyone was asleep when they came, him and his wife, all four kids. At 17, Waleed was the oldest. Khalid estimates there were 25 soldiers. He says some of them broke two doors, came into the house, and smashed the windows of the front room, flipped over couches, tore curtains. As soon as they entered, they started saying to me,

You're Hamas, your Hezbo-Allah. I told them, I'm neither Hamas nor Hezbo-Nah. They went into the kids' room and terrified them. I told the soldiers, wait, wait, just let me. So then I went and gathered all the children and put them here in the spot. Khalid says Walid had on only his underwear and a tank top when they took him away. When they were arresting Waliz, I said to the officer, let us just put pants on him, because that night it was a bit cold.

He said, let us put pants on a jacket on him. But the officer refused. When I asked the Israeli military about Khalid's account of the arrest, they told me that no one filed a report complaining about how it was handled. Two weeks after Walid was arrested, five months before his death, he was charged with, producing an explosive or incendiary device, which is identified as a Molotov cocktail, throwing an explosive device, and arson. The charging document is remarkably vague.

There are no specific locations saying where the crimes allegedly happened, or specific times. One incident supposedly took place, quote, sometime during the year 2022. One of Walid's lawyers pointed out that there's no complainant listed on the charging document. Nobody who went to the authorities and said, This kid threw a Molotov cocktail at my house and caused damage to me. If there were, he said, there would have been more specificity to the charges. The evidence against him seemed to be allegations from two other prisoners. Waleed was being tried under Israeli military law, where the standards of evidence are lower than in civilian court.

All Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to military law. That's been true for almost 60 years. In response to my questions about Waleed's case, the Israeli military sent a statement that said, in part, that Waleed was, quote, imprisoned based on well-founded evidence of his offenses, including testimonies from other operatives against him. It's not clear if Wolleed did any of the things he was charged with. His lawyer said he denied it, and Wolleed died before he could give his defense,

or take a plea. Khaled spent six months trying to find out what was happening to his son in prison. He learned pretty quickly that Wolliq. Khalid was in Magidot prison, hours away, outside the West Bank, in Israel. No one in the family was allowed to communicate with him. They couldn't visit him. Throughout last fall and winter, Khalid went to Walid's court hearings in a military courtroom in the West Bank. The prosecutors and judges were all in the Israeli military.

Walid appeared remotely over a video connection from prison. Khalid saw Wulid for the last time like this, on a TV screen during a court hearing in February. Could you tell how he looked physically? I saw his face. Of course, we could only see him from here and up. His face was thinner. But the day I saw him, he smiled to my face and I smiled back. Khaled says he saw him for only about 20 seconds.

Waleed died six weeks later on March 22nd. The family was informed two days after. What physicians for human rights and others were learning around the time O'Leed died sheds light on how O'Leed might have become so frail in the weeks between when his father last saw him on screen and his death. They learned that some sort of gastrointestinal illness was going around the prison. Lawyers for Palestinians in Israeli prisons reported seeing their clients deteriorate from one visit to the next, getting very thin.

Prisoners, including minors, told their lawyers they were vomiting, had diarrhea, or sometimes fainting, and were rapidly losing weight. Khalid, Welid's father, had heard about it from a friend of Waleeds, who'd been in the same prison and was released. We heard about it from another teenager, who was also held at Magidot prison at the same time as Waleed and knew Waleed. He's 16 years old, and he first spoke to reporter Hagar Shia Zaf at the Israeli newspaper Ha'arets.

In the Ha'arets story, he's called Ibrahim. It's not his real name. I'm going to use that name for him, too. Ibrahim's experience in prison mirrored Walides in several important ways, and he was an eyewitness to Willi's last days. He talked to my producer in the West Bank. Ibrahim and Willid were arrested around the same time.

He said Walid joked around a lot. He was a talker. Yeah, it's had with him, very day. Yes, I talk to him a lot, almost every day I talk to him. When he used to live with me in the same cell, I used to talk to him. We used to talk about food because we were starving. He would say to me, when we get out, God willing, we will go to my father's store, we will eat cashews and nuts.

Ibrahim said they never got enough food. He said everyone was hungry, and everyone stole food from me. each other. After the first two months, they weren't in the same cell anymore. And then around the beginning of March, Ibrahim got sick. It was dropping weight, vomiting, diarrhea. He said when he saw Waleed, he noticed Waleed had similar symptoms. Ibrahim was so sick, he said. He couldn't make it to the toilet in time. He said his sheets were filthy. He couldn't wash his clothes. He smelled. Made him feel like a little child. Ibrahim told Ha'arets that when he asked for medical help,

he was given an over-the-counter drug similar to Tylenol and was told to eat rice and drink water. He said five of his nine cellmates had the same symptoms. Ibrahim said Waleed deteriorated, visibly. He said he saw Wulid the morning he died. Okay, so we were out for the break. Everybody ran towards the bathrooms. His body was weak.

I mean, he couldn't walk a lot. He couldn't run. Neither could I. He opened the cell door. We came out towards the bathrooms. Suddenly he fell on the floor and started bleeding from his mouth. They told us to go back to the cells. We thought it was going to be a crackdown and beating.

But when we went back into the cells, Waleed was bleeding out of his mouth. they put him on the gurney and took him. After Walid died, Ibrahim said the prison made a few changes. They separated out the thinnest prisoners and gave them more food, brought in a washing machine. In May, six weeks after Walid died, Ibrahim was released from prison 11 days early. Ibrahim says he weighed 159 pounds when he entered prison. When he left, he was only 101 pounds, a quarter of one.

according to the parole board. The parole board noted he was, quote, difficult to look at and a cause of great concern. This is for Walid. And this is for Walid. When I visited Halid in April at the family's home, it's pretty, stone, lots of tall windows. He showed me Willid's trophies and ribbons

on a display shelf in their sitting room. They were for soccer. Waleed was a goalie, and also for kickboxing. This also was for Waleed. And also a competition known as the Math Olympics. I put him in private school since he was bright and driven. He was well known for his intelligence and his excellence in math. The kid in Khaled's head was Wolleat's head was Wolleat suspended.

in Amber. Willid from before he was arrested, this energetic teenager, barreling towards adulthood. He had big ideas for the family business. He wanted to expand, open more stores, learn different roasting and grinding methods,

get into cappuccino and espresso. He wanted the company to be a brand name. Khalid had been planning to take Wollid on a trip to Brazil this summer. Wolli had never been. He had just signed Wolli up for driving lessons when he was arrested. There were a close family.

We have a table here in the house In the middle And we would spend so much time chasing each other around the table I would come from here He would go from there I would come from here I would climb the table to get to him

But because he was in good shape He would get away His mom would feel bad for him And tell me poor him You keep chasing after him I tell her, he is the one chasing me. The reason Khalid agreed to an autopsy in the first place is that his lawyer told him it could help him get Walid's body back.

It's the practice of the Israeli government to hold onto bodies of Palestinian prisoners to keep them as bargaining chips. Hamas does it too, with Israeli bodies. Since October 7th, Israel hasn't released the bodies of any Palestinian prisoners, including Willeeds. So Hollid is still waiting. He still hasn't buried his son.

Dan and Chivas. Shouts and battle cry From every part I can see those tears Everyone is true When the door appears I'll go right through Our program is produced today by Dana Chivas and Yael Evan Orr, edited by Nancy Updike, David Kestimbaum, and myself.

The people put together today's show include Jindai Bonds, Michael Comitay, Suzanne Gabbardagh, Y'Anjafee Wald, Catherine Raimondo, Valerie Kipness, Andrea Marks, Don Nelson, Nadia Riemann, Ike Sris Kondaraj, Lili Sallin, Frances Swanson, Chris Rostata, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor, Sarah Abdur Eman, our executive editor is Emmanuel Perry. Other people who worked on the show as reporters and producers, Ahmed al-Baz, Jude Taha, Salsun Khalifa, and Hanyahuasli, editor Sarah Yassin, translator Shani Avivam, Talya Kreevsky, Bashar Ahalabi, and Dana Balut, also voice actor Walid Zouetur.

Special thanks today at Henriette Chakar, Noah Cohen, Matt Duss, Oriel Eisner, Daniel Estrin, Kar Ali Francis, Neda Freha, Alit Givati, Rami Gali, Umel Gatfi, Harlow Holmes, Matthew Hooper, the team at Hotspot Cover, Aida Kaden, Ariel Kahana, Jessica Mantel and Danny Shenhar at Hamoked, Reham Nasra, Ravreve, Rovee Rovee Rovee, Stefan Schmidt, Gaishelagh, Yula Schaulh, and Seth Fried Wessler. Our website, This AmericanLife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia.

He was like, yeah, yeah, Robert Frost, two roads diverge in a yellow wood. But I have another road. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life. This week in this American life, when Angela's family goes on vacation, her dad plans everything. One year, the plan went awry. I don't think I was particularly traumatized.

Wow. You went to, like, you got hit by lightning. Like, lightning's not personal. The lightning wasn't like, Angela, you're ugly. The lightning was just doing its thing. When nature, fate, the federal government, mess with your plans, That's next week on the podcast or a new local public radio station.