Tonight after coming back from Mount Olive, we each split up to gather cooking ingredients from the markets around our hostel. We get back to the hostel and cook a meal for eight people in a kitchen just large enough for two grown adults to stand in.
Our hostel is on the Japanese backpacking trail and currently there is a huge number of Japanese backpackers here. We all gathered for dinner and half of them assume that I too am Japanese and converse freely with me in Japanese, until I tell them that I can’t understand Japanese. Then its quiet the rest of the time.
During the middle of our dinner four civilian dressed men came into the hostel with one man dressed in Israeli soldiers’ uniform. They are all carrying firearms and the soldier is holding an Uzi. They check all the dorm rooms and then find an elderly Japanese guy. I was talking to him earlier and he was a Japanese journalist on vacation in Israel. They cuffed and shackled him and the rest of the guards searched his bags. When he protested and told the soldiers to be careful with his belongings, one soldier strikes him on the back of head with his rifle.
The hostel owner and the soldiers are yelling back in forth. I can’t be sure they’re yelling because Arabic and Hebrew all sound like angry languages to me. The hostel owner then comes over to our table and assures us that everything is okay as the Japanese guy is bleeding profusely from the back of his head. Then the soldiers gather his bags and drag him out cuffed and shackled to an H2 hummer sitting outside.
It was an unbelievable experience and I had an urge to take some pictures from our balcony he was escorted out. It was just really hard to get a good picture since the sun had already set and it was dark outside. The entire experience was surreal and the danger portion of it didn’t really settle in until after they had left. I wonder what happened to that guy.
Jeez! That's scary! Nobody was able to tell you why he was arrested?
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