Ramallah: A woman from Ezbat Salman near Qalqilya in the West Bank has been arrested for torturing her two stepsons, one of whom died, after she used an iron pestle among other means to brutalise them, inflicting blows to the heads of the two boys.
Villagers managed to save the life of the older boy, Elias, rushing him to the Schneider Children’s Medical Centre in Israel, but the younger child died of his injuries.
Health authorities declared Ayham Jamal Quzmar, 7, dead at the scene and he was buried late on Tuesday after permission was obtained from the Palestinian Public Prosecution authority.
Forensic authorities found evidence of torture on the victim’s body, and a senior police official reported that the stepmother was arrested immediately.
Sources in Ezbat Salman told Gulf News that it was common knowledge that the woman was abusive to the two children, and that on several occasions villagers and religious leaders had begged the mother and her husband to stop their mistreatment of the children, but their appeals had landed on deaf ears.
The children’s biological mother, who is the owner of a photo studio, was in Amman when the crime took place. At the time that her husband took a second wife, the children’s real mother refused to stay with him and left for Amman. She had been forbidden access to the children by their father, who left them instead in the care of their abusive stepmother.
On the night of the murder, the woman first crushed her stepsons’ heads with the pestle, then threw Ayham off the roof of the house.
Shocked villagers are calling for the woman to be hanged, and have urged the police and Public Prosecution Authority to indict her for first degree murder.
The leader of the father’s family, Hussain Quzmar, said the family decided on Wednesday to disown their son. He Gulf News that Ayham’s blood is on the hands of each and every member of the Quzmar family who did not do enough to save his life and prevent his death.
The stepmother had been abusing the children for more than two years.
“The woman denied the two kids the chance to go to kindergarten and school,” Hussain Quzmar said. “She had a special room dedicated to their torture, where she routinely locked them up. She beat them right in front of their father who did nothing to protect his kids.”
The woman is also believed to have often burnt the boys with cigarettes and gagged them so that people couldn’t hear their screams.
“The kids would shake when they saw their stepmother and used to beg people to take them away from her,” Quzmar told Gulf News. “They even used to wet their pants in fear when they saw her.”
One of the woman’s sisters was also believed to have been involved in the torture. The family reported this to the Palestinian police, and she too has been detained.
Both women have reportedly confessed to torturing the boys for years.
“Ayham’s death will have saved his brother Elias’s life, if he survives his injuries,” Quzmar said. “People will now have the chance to take care of him.”
Family members and police officers have recovered the tools used by the woman and her sister to torture the children.
The father holds an Israeli identity card, and the victim and his brother are registered under his name. The Israeli officers at the Palestinian-Israeli Security Coordination Liaison Office demanded that the elder brother be transferred to an Israeli hospital and have initiated an intensive investigation into the murder.
The father has been taken into Israeli custody.
