Palestinian Paramedic Recounts His Arrest

When Ibrahim Al-Ghouleh first spotted the tanks in the rear-view window as the convoy of ambulances he was traveling in made its way down Ramallah's Jaffa Street, he instantly realized that, medical emergency notwithstanding, they weren't going anywhere anytime soon.

A paramedic working for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, Al-Ghouleh says he is all too familiar with the hazards of his job.

But what he didn't anticipate, when the Israeli tanks stopped the three Red Crescent ambulances on Tuesday, was that the ordeal would last approximately eight long hours, at the end of which, he would be staggering out of an Israeli detention center cold, wet, free — and yet stranded.

Along with six other Red Crescent medics — including the president of the humanitarian society, Younis Al-Khatib — Al-Ghouleh was attempting to make his way to the Bitunia neighborhood of Ramallah, an area that has seen particularly severe fighting and isolation since the Israeli offensive in the West Bank began last week.

Despite several reports of deaths and injuries in and around Bitunia, ambulances have not been allowed into the area since Israel began Operation Defensive Shield last Friday. In line with this policy, the Red Crescent convoy was stopped by Israeli tanks as it reached the city park area in downtown Ramallah at around 8 a.m.

"Usually what they (Israeli soldiers) do is they ask us to get down from the ambulances and go about 200 meters away from the vehicles, then they search the vehicles and then they let us get back in," says Al-Ghouleh in a telephone interview with ABCNEWS.com from the Red Crescent offices in Al-Bireh, a West Bank town not far from Ramallah.

"But this time, they asked us to get down and blocked us from all sides — by the tanks — to make sure that nobody, no press people, could see us," he says.

The seven Red Crescent staffers say they were then made to turn off their cell phones and hand them over to the soldiers before being strip-searched to ensure they had no explosives strapped to their bodies.