There are men who measure their lives in years. Others in miles. And then there are those for whom time is counted in the rust of prison bars, the number of interrogations endured, the names of loved ones lost while the walls of a cell swallowed their youth whole.
Nael Barghouti has lived 44 years inside Israel’s prisons. That is nearly half a century of listening to cell doors slam shut, of memorizing the scent of concrete and steel, of watching the seasons change only in the expressions of new inmates who enter as boys and leave as old men—if they ever leave at all.
At 67, he had spent more of his life behind bars than he has in the sunlit fields of Kobar, his village outside Ramallah. In a land where the sky stretches wide but the roads are lined with walls, the prisoner’s fate is a national inheritance. Since 1967, Israel has arrested over one million Palestinians. One in five. No family is untouched. No generation unscathed.
Nael was a student activist who took part in many protests against the Israeli occupation. He was arrested by Israeli soldiers from his family home in Kobar on April 4, 1978, accused of being involved in an attack for allegedly killing an Israeli bus driver north of Ramallah. His brother, Omar, was also arrested, along with his cousin, Fakhri. Nael’s sentence: life plus 18 years. He was released in 2011 in the Shalit prisoner exchange, only to be rearrested in 2014. Not for a new crime. Not for any violation committed outside. But because the rogue Zionist regime can decide that the past is a prison sentence that never ends.
Now, after decades in confinement, Nael Barghouti’s name is once again on a list. He is among 800 prisoners set for release in the largest phase of a new exchange deal—one that will see 200 women and children freed, along with 445 detainees from Gaza who Israel itself has admitted played no role in the events of October 7. Among them, too, are Alaa Al-Bazian, imprisoned for 42 years, and Samer Al-Mahroom, for 38.
But, there is a catch. There is always a catch. Barghouti, along with other so-called “high-profile” prisoners, will not be allowed to return home. Israel is releasing them and will deport them, where he will remain, exiled from the land where his mother and father are buried, from the soil where he once ran as a boy.
His wife, Eman Nafe, herself a former prisoner, does not believe he will accept these terms. “I am sure he will refuse this,” she says. Because for Nael Barghouti, as for so many others, a cell in Palestine is still Palestine. And freedom in exile is not freedom at all.
Meanwhile, the machinery of occupation churns on. In the last 24 hours alone, Israel has arrested 30 more Palestinians across the West Bank. Among them is 15-year-old Karim Jarrar, a boy whose only crime was delivering supplies on his bicycle to Jenin Hospital when Israeli forces laid siege to it last August.
There are 10,400 Palestinians in Israeli prisons today. This does not include the thousands detained in Gaza during 15 months of unrelenting war. Nearly half of these people are hostages, held without charge, without trial, without the pretense of due process. Just bodies, swallowed whole by a supremacist system designed to make them disappear.
And when they are not disappeared, they are brutalized. Israel’s army radio has revealed that five Israeli soldiers tortured a Palestinian prisoner in “Sde Teiman” prison, stabbing him in the back with a sharp object, breaking his ribs, puncturing his lung.
The world will not weep for him. His name will not trend. His suffering will not stir emergency UN sessions, nor will his face grace magazine covers. He is not white afterall.
Nor will they weep for Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, whose only crime was tending to the wounded of Gaza.
One of Gaza’s most prominent doctors, he remained at Kamal Adwan Hospital as the bombs rained down, his hands stitching wounds even as the walls around him collapsed. He stayed because leaving meant death for his patients. He stayed because this is what doctors do—they heal, even in hell.
Then, in late December, Israeli forces stormed the hospital. They did not come for medicine. They did not come for care. They came with guns, and they took Dr. Abu Safiya away. They destroyed what was left of Kamal Adwan, reducing it to rubble, taking it out of service, as if it were a military target rather than a sanctuary for the wounded.
Inside Israeli prisons, Abu Safiya was subjected to severe torture and starvation, his family says. A lawyer who recently visited him confirmed their worst fears. A doctor who spent his life saving others now fights to survive his own captivity. Arrested last December, he has been dragged from cell to cell, a doctor stripped of his instruments, forced to witness the destruction of his life’s work from the inside of a prison. His name, too, is on the list of those to be released this week. But his detention—like that of every Palestinian held by Israel—was never about guilt or innocence. It was about power. The power to erase. The power to crush.
Under the ceasefire agreement, Hamas was set to release 33 Israeli hostages in this first six-week phase—women, children, the elderly, the ill. In return, Israel will release 1,167 Palestinians detained in Gaza during the war and 737 others from the West Bank, Jerusalem, or Gaza.
But what of the thousands who remain? What of those who will be arrested tomorrow? And the day after? What of the next 15-year-old boy taken in the night, the next doctor pulled from the rubble of his hospital?
Barghouti will walk out of his cell and into an unfamiliar world. He will learn that his only brother has died. That his nephew was martyred. That his village is unrecognizable. He will walk into a homeland that looks more like a prison than the cell he is leaving.
The doors will open for him. But for how long?
For every prisoner released, another is taken. For every man who walks free, another child is bound, blindfolded, and dragged into the machine. The cycle does not break; it tightens. The noose draws closer. The prison expands beyond walls, beyond checkpoints, beyond the geography of confinement.
And now, the violence Israel once tried to keep hidden is spilling into the light.
As reported in Haaretz, surveillance video footage appeared a few months ago, showing Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee inside the notorious Sde Teiman prison.
After, In the end of January, Israel’s state attorney Amit Isman, dismissed an investigation against five soldiers suspected of killing a bound Palestinian they held captive.
Despite video evidence and admissions of guilt from the suspects, Isman dropped the investigation citing “low credibility of the confessions, which are likely just bravado.”
“Tearing someone’s rectum with an object is called rape,” Assal Rad reminds the world on X.
But when the perpetrators are Israeli and the victim is Palestinian, suddenly The New York Times forgets the language of sexual violence. The same media that once prided itself on exposing war crimes, on speaking truth to power, now bends over backward to sanitize the unspeakable. A Palestinian prisoner is raped in an Israeli dungeon, and suddenly, the thesaurus is out. Suddenly, they are “assaulted.” They are “mistreated.” They are “subjected to acts of violence.” The truth is buried under careful, calculated euphemisms.
Meanwhile, Israelis are literally rioting in support of the soldiers who did this.
According to The Times of Israel, the right-wing Honenu legal aid organization is defending four of the reservist soldiers, claiming they acted in self-defense. Self-defense. Against a defenseless, bound Palestinian prisoner.
There have been multiple allegations of rape and sexual abuse of Palestinian women and men by Israeli soldiers. But Western media, which covered every unverified claim against Hamas with breathless urgency, has overwhelmingly ignored these reports.
Because when the victim is Palestinian, rape is not called rape. Torture is not called torture. Murder is not called murder.
And when they are forced to acknowledge the truth—when the bruises and wounds can no longer be denied—they follow the same script, softening the language, distorting reality, making the crime just vague enough to be forgettable.
But the prisoners will not forget.
Their families will not forget.
Palestine will not forget.
And neither should we.
Thank you for giving a humane, vivid, albeit harrowing picture to account for what is cruelly cold and factual otherwise.
Free Palestine till it's backwards ✌🏻❤️💚🤍🖤
When will be able to wake up from this horrific nightmare? 🥲