Since Abdullah Ibhais used to video-call his family three times a day any time he was away, his two young children - aged four and six - cannot now understand why they don’t see him. “Their mother tells them he is travelling, but they don’t buy it,” Ibhais’ brother Ziad says. “They’re questioning every day, ‘why does dad stop loving us? Why did he desert us?’ They think they have done something wrong.”
The children understandably haven’t been told their father is in prison, even though - according to human rights groups – Ibhais has done nothing wrong either. The Jordanian national of Palestinian descent advised the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy that they should acknowledge their role in a failure to pay striking workers at the Al Shahaniya labour camp in August 2019.
