Freed as part of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza, which saw around 1,900 Palestinian prisoners released, these four men are among 154 prisoners who had been serving life sentences.
They recount the systemic and institutional Israeli policy of abuse, torture, denial of medical care, deprivation of food and water, and even the confiscation of time, intimate testimonies about what it means to be “out” after decades of detention in Israeli dungeons.
Yet they did not return to their homes in Palestine but were exiled. They left behind over 9,100 Palestinian comrades in those prison walls, including 400 children and 75 women, in addition to 3,380 being held without trial, and 350 serving life sentences.
Nasser Abu Srour: ‘I am the wall’
When the gate of the Israeli prison finally opened after nearly 33 years, Nasser Abu Srour did not believe it. “Even when the bus started moving, I was waiting for someone to tell me: Did you really believe you were free? Get off.”
Nasser belonged to the student movement of Fatah when he was arrested by the occupation army in January 1993 and accused of having killed an Israeli intelligence officer during the first intifada (1987–1993).
Serving a life sentence, he lived between four walls for 33 years. When the release lists began to circulate, he did not want to believe them. He had already seen four waves of release without ever being included. “The disappointment is as great as the waiting,” he says. “So I reduced my expectations.” That was his coping mechanism.
On the day itself, soldiers opened the cells: “Get ready.” His cell was number 6. “When they pronounced my name, I did not collapse as I had always imagined I would at that moment. My defence mechanism was still holding.”
He describes the embraces and the looks of his comrades. The old T-shirts and shorts that became “booty” because everything was lacking in the cell. The Israelis had confiscated all the clothes. “We sewed everything, even our underwear. One single shirt; if you had two, you were Rothschild.”
At the Rafah crossing on the Palestinian side, occupied by the Israeli army, fear returned. The soldiers shouted, rifles raised, when the freed prisoners tried to open the curtains of the bus. “The door was closed. I whispered, Open Sesame, and the door finally moved.”
Once on the Egyptian side of the crossing, he took a deep breath. “Oh God, there is a sky. An immense sky.” Tears in his eyes, the sentence remained suspended.
“The outside is not a place; it is a feeling. And for the first time, the outside was truly outside, physical and emotional,” the Palestinian man says.
Leaving a boat-restaurant on the Nile in Cairo, Nasser walks slowly, as if relearning the world, now at the age of 56. He speaks with the same voice as in his books, poetic, philosophical, and always with a “wow” on his lips.
“They say that two beings never lose their sense of wonder: the child and the philosopher. After 33 years in a cave, I may be returning to childhood, or perhaps I am starting to philosophize.”
Since his release, he says he has done “500 things for the first time.” Entering a hotel, sitting in a car, looking at a beautiful woman. “Astonishment is a divine act,” he says. But this astonishment mingles with shock. The simplest things overwhelm him. Even the sunglasses and the phone he holds seem heavy.
In the hotel, everything seems strange to him. He asks how to order water, how to wash clothes, how to enter a room. “Prison was simpler.”
Nasser was born and grew up in the precariousness of the Aida refugee camp, near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. His mother, Mazyouna, “the beautiful,” spent years visiting him from prison to prison before dying only 70 days before his release.
“She broke a great promise,” he murmurs. “I told her: wait for me. We began this journey together; we will finish it together. Maybe she did not want to become an ordinary woman again, simply the mother of a free man. She preferred to remain the mother of the captive. She chose to become a legend.”
Nasser experienced interrogations, isolation, and transfers from one notorious Israeli prison to another, Ofer, Gannot, and then finally in the Naqab desert.
He describes prison as a laboratory of cruelty. “The Israelis treated us like experimental subjects, like one train monkeys and dogs in Pavlov’s experiments and behavioral science.”
He details this mechanism of collective punishment. “The courtyard where we used to walk for one hour each day… was reduced to 20 minutes since the start of the war in October 2023. They drew a yellow rectangular line. It is forbidden for anyone to cross it. If we do, the punishment is collective. All those who are in the yard are beaten with batons or tear-gassed. So, everyone rushes toward the one who moved to pull him back behind the line.”
A parallel time in prison
In an Israeli prison, as in Blindness by José Saramago, a book that explored the horrendous possibilities of human nature, “the first thing that forms is a hierarchy. Who governs, who is strong, who will take the most food… There is no more cultural existence, only biological existence. We lived two years of biological existence.”
The same food, the same hunger. Some grew thinner and thinner until they could no longer lose any more weight. “Before the war on Gaza, I weighed 71 kilos; I fell to 59.”
“We lived in survival mode… And survival here became very individual,” he explains.
However, Nasser always speaks of prison as a marginal detail. It is never the main fabric of his history. One day, his niece Shaza asked him to talk to her about prison.
“I refused, telling her: prison is an idea. This idea has no problem in the world of the abstract; do not materialize it. Do not see me locked in a place, but in an idea.” Another mechanism.
Three decades, but time was not the enemy, he believes. He speaks of a “parallel time,” an existence that accumulates instead of flowing. “The years in prison pile up; the piling becomes mass, the mass has weight, the weight is fatigue…” To survive, he transformed that fatigue into resistance. “You must manipulate the prison, or it breaks you.”
“And in prison, the place is the same, the wall that you carry with you at every moment, from prison to prison. It may change form, color, but it remains the same wall.”
With time, the wall became his companion. “I am the product of the wall,” he says. “I do not leave it. It is my landmark. I leaned on it; I cried on it. It separated me from the world, but it also protected me from it. I am the wall, and the wall is me.”
He laughs at those who want to “shake off the dust of prison.” “If you shake the prison off yourself, what remains of you?”
This intimacy with the stone inspired his first novel, Tale of a Wall (Hekayet Guedar, Dar al-Adab, 2022). He recounts the day when a fellow prisoner brought him his book, confiscated several times; slowly, he lifted it… “I was afraid he would drop it. I rushed to carry it like a baby.”
After his release, he doubted his ability to write a dedication for his new book. Deprived of paper and pencil for two years, it took time to regain his hand. “I finally managed to write four lines… They did not steal my language. They couldn’t.”
He no longer knows whether he should curse or bless this experience. “I have often said that prison gave me everything,” he admits.
“That was perhaps a defense mechanism. But it is true that my greatest work is prison itself. I carry it with me. It is heavy, yes. But pain is heavy, joy too…”
For now, he only wants to stand, to feel the earth under his feet. “I need a fixed point to interpret the things around me.”
Nader Sadaqa: The road of suffering
Nader Sadaqa, nicknamed “the Samaritan,” was the first to be released from Israeli prisons under the latest exchange agreement. But his journey to freedom was the most painful—a two-day convoy from the extreme north to the extreme south of Palestine, which he describes as “the road of suffering,” a march of humiliation and terror.
On the morning of 8 October 2023, he was at Shata prison in the north. Transferred alone to Ramon prison, it took him 12 hours to arrive. He spent the night there before being declared free in the morning. Then another journey began, even longer. Now they are about 20 Palestinians. “Our transfer began at dawn on Wednesday and ended Friday morning,” he says.
Their last meal was dated to the afternoon of 7 October. The checkpoints they passed through—“stations of harassment and torture”, turned the road into a calvary.
Forced to stand against the wall from 2 p.m. until 6 a.m., they could not move for fear of being shot. “The slightest gesture could cost us our lives.” Suffering mixed with screams, insults, and blood. Nothing to eat, nothing to sleep on. “It broke the human being to the marrow of his dignity.”
Nader, 48, comes from Mount Gerizim in Nablus. From the Samaritan community, the oldest Jewish community in the world, which asserts descent from the original children of Israel and rejects the Zionists’ religious claim to Jerusalem. Leader of the Abu Ali Mustafa brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), he was sentenced in 2004 to six life sentences plus 45 years in prison.
For him, the release itself was an act of revenge. “Every Israeli guard wanted to take revenge before seeing a prisoner leave,” he recounts. Being human or jailer, there are, for him, only these two choices. “These guards lost their humanity. They treated us like inferior beings, convinced that we, Arabs, are just one extra minority that must be gotten rid of.”
A new era of brutality
The man they called “the intellectual” in prison distinguishes two eras: before and after 7 October. Before, he says, “there still existed a limit, a semblance of order imposed by our internal organization.” After, everything collapsed.
“Legal, political, popular protections disappeared. The world fell silent, Gaza burned, and the jailer now knew he could beat, torture and kill, without consequence. That day the capacity, will, and opportunity came together. It was total unleashing. Israel found the pretext it had long awaited. Nothing was improvised.”
Prisoners then became the most vulnerable target. “Everything served as an instrument of torture: hunger, lack of sunlight, lack of hygiene, lack of care,” he confides. Emaciated, hollow-eyed, a scarf in the colours of Palestine on his shoulders, he remembers: “In the first months, between 25 and 30 detainees died, from medical negligence, from beatings, or from diseases deliberately spread in the cells.”
The personnel’s torment? It doesn’t matter. The weight loss? It doesn’t matter.
Was he afraid? “It is not fear that should be questioned, but what could still reassure us. Nothing. My fear was falling, because if I fell, I would have dragged others with me. Fear of being beaten, humiliated, broken. And that fear… it served me for nothing.”
But he fears even more those who remained behind: those young Palestinians of 17 and 18 who saw a young comrade die of untreated hepatitis. “When he began to rave, the guards dragged him outside, mocked him, staged a kind of funeral in the yard. They left him there 16 hours, until he stopped breathing.”
The objective of the prison administration, he says, was clear: “to empty us of our militant content, to disperse, disintegrate, crush. To turn bodies into dust so they could never rebuild. The worst was feeling that they were tearing our humanity away from us.”
Yet, in his gaze, nothing is broken. Nader speaks with the same certainty that accompanied him behind bars. “Resistance was, and remains, the detainees’ choice in the enemy’s bastilles. It is the only possible choice. We have no option but to hold. We do not have the luxury of abandoning or choosing another path.”
Bassem Khandakji: The captive’s pen
Sitting in a narrow corridor of a hotel in New Cairo, Bassem Khandakji speaks in the singular to describe the plural. “What I experienced was a collective experience.” For him, the essence of Israel’s carceral violence is “to attack the Palestinian body, its substance, and then to attack the consciousness and the psyche.”
This sentence runs like a thread through a testimony woven from facts and fragments of images: confiscated food, watches taken away, humiliating clothes, prolonged isolation.
Arrested in 2004 and sentenced to three life terms, he walks out at the age of 42 after more than 20 years in prison, where he began to forge a body of fiction that would earn him the 2024 Arab Booker Prize for his novel A Mask the Colour of the Sky (Qenaa bi lawn al-sama).
But that achievement also brought him a series of beatings and torture. “More than six times, because they could not stand the idea of a prisoner who could write, think, and exist.”
For the past two years, he says, Israel’s imprisonment policies have changed in nature, beyond anything Palestinians had known since 1967. “They are obsessed with tiny details,” he says, describing practices designed to break the person. Hunger, Bassem says, has become a method of governance. “We were deliberately starved, deprived of everything, to reduce our existence to mere survival.”
In the early years of his imprisonment, harsh as they were, there remained a minimum of rules, a framework wrested through bitter struggle.
“From 1967 to 2023, despite everything, we managed to impose certain conditions that respected, in their most minimal form, the dignity of the human being. But after 2023, all that was erased. The true face of colonialism revealed itself, brutal, naked, without a mask.”
Bassem reflects on the meaning of this collective release. “Unlike previous ones, this time we weren’t just freed, we were saved from death. For two years, we lived with the certainty that the guard, a young man barely twenty, held the power to kill us at any moment.”
The colonial laboratory
He evokes his late friend and fellow prisoner, the essayist and novelist Walid Daqqa, who was a major voice in documenting the prison experience and its resistance.
Daqqa, who spent 38 years in Israeli jails until he died in 2024, used to say that the Israelis practised a “cauterization of the conscience.” As he explained it: “If you think freely, I will punish you. If you hope, I will make you suffer,” says Bassem.
“The cold rooms of Israeli prisons still hold the bodies of our comrades,” he says. Among them is Daqaa, “whom I dream of seeing reborn in a grave worthy of him.”
Collective punishments are a constant example. “When one prisoner makes a mistake, they punish all the others. Why? Because it’s a way to erase differences, to reduce us to a single indistinct body, a body to dominate.”
The Palestinian man describes this logic in meticulous detail. “They forced us to wear humiliating, badly cut uniforms, all of one color, so we would all look the same. They took away our books, our personal belongings, our watches. Even time was stolen from us.”
For him, this time deprivation is a political act. “When they confiscate your watch, they remove your temporality. And to lose the sense of time is to be reduced to the animal. Man is distinguished because he knows he exists in time. They wanted to take that consciousness from us.”
Like the other freed prisoners, he insists that the prisons were “a colonial laboratory.” “What the occupier applies against prisoners, he eventually applies outside, against the entire Palestinian people.”
In prison, literature was his weapon. “Writing was for me an act of resistance, an act of freedom, an act of existence.”
Deprived of paper and pen, the ex-prisoner trained himself to write in his head. “During the last six months before my release, I wrote an entire novel in my head. Each day I repeated the sentences, the images, so I wouldn’t forget them. I will carry it with me until I’m ready to lay it down on paper.”
Since his release, he has discovered a new world, strange, almost unreal. He is still discovering the technology, the smartphones.
The most painful thing for Bassem, he says, is the absence of his family, whom he could not embrace. “I came out free, but without my mother’s arms. A mutilated freedom.” Only his sister was able to welcome him. He speaks of his experience with lucidity and distance. “I am not completely healed.”
Despite the losses, his father's death during his detention, the vanished years, the stolen youth, he refuses bitterness. “I have lost a lot. I could have had a family, children grown by now. But I regret nothing. Every struggle has its price.”
And he smiles, almost serene: “What I did was turn prison into an opportunity. It gave me a voice. My literary prize is the proof of that.” In the short term, he delights in contact with readers and public meetings in Cairo’s bookstores.
Raed Abdel Jalil: The struggle against the beast
The cold crept into the bones. Raed Abdel Jalil remembers those nights when, in the Negev prison, six men pressed against one another on the floor to try to hold on to a bit of heat.
“We piled every piece of clothing we had on our bodies to warm up a bit,” he says. “That was the icy cold you used to read about in novels. We lived it. We understood what it is to die of hunger and cold.”
Raed spent 23 years in Israeli prisons. He was released in February 2025 at the age of 44 as part of the first wave of prisoner exchanges.
Today, he helps his recently released compatriots in Egypt find their bearings and adapt to this newfound freedom in exile. He accompanies one to the hospital, takes another to buy clothes…
He returns to that turning point of 7 October. “The cells were searched, emptied, stripped. The Israeli guards took everything. Everything. There remained only a mattress for each man, one blanket and one item of clothing; later there would be two. Nothing else.” Even salt and sugar were confiscated.
Breakfast, Raed recounts, often amounted to 50 grams of yoghurt, one olive, and three pieces of bread. “Sometimes the olives were not enough, so two or three people wouldn’t eat any. The rest of the day: a half-raw slice of turkey, then two-thirds of a cup of rice, half a cup of vegetable soup and a spoonful of jam every three days.
And then there was thirst. “Water was cut off 23 hours out of 24. We had a single hour to wash, to do our needs, to wash our clothes and to fill bottles to drink. Two hundred and fifty prisoners and six toilets.”
Originally from a mountainous region between Nablus and Jenin, Raed was arrested in 2002 and sentenced to four life terms and 40 years in prison for operations against settlers and Israeli soldiers; he refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court. “To recognize that court was to recognize the legality of the occupation.”
At Hadarim, as at Gilboa, Ashkelon, Nafha, and Ramon prisons, he discovered another world: that of a miniature Palestinian society, organized, solidary, structured by the need for dignity. “We had built a small state behind the walls. Every six months we elected our representatives.” Twelve delegates, five of whom formed a leadership team. “We lived by rules, not like gangs. We even had universities.”
Raed learned everything there. “When I entered, I didn’t even have my high-school diploma. I was ashamed to write to my mother. Thanks to Marwan Barghouti, Abu al-Qassam, I understood that we had to become conscious, educated militants. He always said: without conscience, resistance becomes a disaster for its people.”
Thus, he obtained a degree in political science, then a master’s, and wrote two novels, Love and the Gun and The Visit.
Solidarity in the dark
But after October, all that disappeared. “They would enter the cells before dawn, pick two or three young men, tie their hands and feet, throw them onto the icy water of the yard for four or five hours. For no reason. Just to remind us that they could do anything.”
Twelve men crammed into a cell meant for four, without ventilation. All cleaning products were forbidden. Scabies spread, wounds became infected, skin fell away. “When they let us out after seven months, I saw zombies. The living dead. I no longer recognized my comrades.”
One day, Raed saw a 17-year-old boy die. “He had scabies. His body was covered in wounds. I begged the guards: this man is dying, I told them, look at him. They uncovered his body, saw the wounds and replied: let him die in the cell. He weighed 36 kilos. A week later, he died. And we could do nothing.” Raed stops. “The worst is that feeling of helplessness. To see him die without being able to give him even a piece of bread or a pain killer.”
This chaos, however, produced an unexpected unity. “Before, each faction had its cell: Hamas, Jihad, Fatah, Popular Front. After October, they mixed us on purpose to break our structures. But the opposite happened: we united.”
“We had nothing left. Not even a pen. So, the sheikh recited the Quran, and we learned. Everyone gave what they knew. The one who spoke English taught it, the one who knew the history of Palestine told it.”
“I learned English with Nasser Abu Srour. Deprived of paper, we carved letters on the walls with pieces of metal. One night the guards saw the marks, they came in and beat us for hours.”
For two years, they were almost cut off from the world, with no visits, no radio, no news. Yet, in that silence, they recreated a language: words whispered between cells' windows, messages passed from one cell to another. “We would say to each other: hold on, this is only a stage, it will pass.”
“Even in hunger, we tried to remain human,” says Raed. The sharing of food became a form of resistance. “The greatest responsibility was not being the teacher; it was being the one who distributed the meal. Distribution was done in the center of the yard so that everyone could see that it was fair. We doubled the rations for the old and the sick.”
Emblematic figures, like Ahmad Saadat, often offered up their share. “Even at 72 years old, he would keep a few pieces of bread each day, and the next day he would give them to others. He knew who would not hold. That simple gesture reminded us that we were still human. It was our fight not to become beasts.”
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