Hamas' Secret Plan to "Liberate" Palestine: Gaza police shaving heads of young men in crackdown on western fashion

At least 40 men in past month claim to have been bound, beaten and had their hair cut by Hamas officers, says rights group

Harriet Sherwood in Gaza City
guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 April 2013 

"Ismail Helou was working at his family's petrol station on a Thursday afternoon when a police jeep pulled up. The plain-clothed officers ordered him to get into the vehicle. He was blindfolded and taken to a police station, where his legs were bound to a wooden plank and the soles of his feet were repeatedly beaten with a plastic pipe. Then they tried to shave off the gelled spikes of hair on his head.
"I was screaming and crying. It was the most painful thing I have ever faced. My feet were blue and I couldn't walk for three days," he said. Bruises on his soles were still visible three weeks later..........


Over the past month, at least 40 men have had their heads shaved by Hamas officers in a pattern of intimidation and abuse aimed at enforcing Islamic mores governing personal appearance, according to the human rights organisation Al Mezan. The individuals have been targeted for sporting "western" hairstyles or wearing low-slung jeans that reveal underwear. But one, to whom the Guardian spoke, insisted he was guilty of neither "offence", but was beaten and shaved simply as a mechanism of social control.
Rajou Hayek, 33, was bundled into a police jeep by eight men as he was taking his father, who was in a wheelchair, to a health clinic. Handcuffed and with his T-shirt pulled over his head, he was driven to a police station where he glimpsed a "hill of hair" on the floor. "They beat me all over my body and shaved my head. I was crying. This is not about jeans and hairstyles. They want to make people in Gaza afraid of them.".......

But there was also a political dimension. "This is partly directed at Hamas members internally. Hamas was elected promising an Islamic state and some of their own supporters complain that it has not been implemented," he said. This led to the formation of some extreme fundamentalist factions which put Hamas under pressure to prove its Islamist credentials........"