Israeli hostages of Hamas give a new lease of life to Palestinian prisoners

Rawan Al-Najjar, a Palestinian mother of three kids from the occupied West Bank, is a few days away from giving birth to another baby. She hasn’t met her husband in almost 8 years. The baby was conceived from sperm smuggled out of an Israeli prison where Amjad al-Najjar is being held.

So when she heard news that Hamas fighters had crossed over into Israeli settlements from besieged Gaza and taken Israeli civilians and soldiers as hostages, she started wondering about a possible prisoner exchange.

“I haven’t stopped thinking - making up these hypothetical scenarios in my head,” she tells TRT World.

“I imagine him beside me when our baby is born, him kissing my forehead and holding the child in his arms like any other normal family.”

Rawan is among relatives of over 6,000 Palestinian prisoners languishing in Israeli prisons. Many of them have been incarcerated on flimsy charges and denied proper legal representation.

A prisoner exchange is the only hope for them to reunite with their families.

In 2011, Israel released more than a thousand Palestinians in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit.

In its October 7th operations Hamas has taken more than 150 Israeli hostages and moved them to Gaza.

But an exchange this time around appears unlikely as indicated by the Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan who told CNN that the issue of hostages is “not going to stop us, prevent us from doing what we need to do in order to secure the future of Israel.”

Israel has launched relentless airstrikes on the besieged enclave of Gaza, killing more than 1,300 people and displacing 338,000 who have been forced to take shelter in UN-run schools after their buildings and houses were flattened.

This steadfast Israeli posture has added to worries of Rawan who fears that Israeli authorities could penalise Palestinian prisoners in a reaction.

Since Hamas’s “Operation Al Aqsa Flood”, the Israeli Prison Administration has sealed off all the prisons, confiscated electronic devices from prison cells and barred lawyers and family members from meeting them.

Yet many loved ones of the Palestinian prisoners are still holding on to some hope. That’s all they can do.

A life in confinement

Sixty-six-year-old Nael Barghouti, who hails from Kobar village near Ramallah, has spent around 43 years in Israeli detention. He was arrested in 1978 and imprisoned for life.

As fate would have it, he was among the Palestinians exchanged for Gilad Shalit in 2011. As a free man, Barghouti married Iman Nafi and together they dreamt about building a home.

But Israeli authorities arrested him again in 2014 in response to the killing of three Israeli settlers in Hebron.

“He was given a 30-month sentence and I was hoping he’d walk out and the ordeal will end. But they kept extending his detention and ultimately gave him a life sentence again,” says Nafi.

A lot has happened for Barghouti in the past nine years since his second imprisonment: his parents died and so did his brother. One of his nephews was shot dead by the Israelis.

“When I saw the news about Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, I wondered if this could become a means for freedom of those incarcerated in Israeli prisons for years,” says Nafi.

Longing for a mother

Fadwa Hamada, a mother of five, was arrested by the Israeli police in 2017 at a military checkpoint for allegedly attacking an Israeli soldier with a knife.

Her husband, Munther Hamadeh has been raising the kids as a single parent, making them food, reading them bedtime stories and choosing what clothes they’d wear.

“Throughout her detention, we hoped that a prisoner exchange deal would be concluded and she would walk out. It was a long wait,” he says.

“Now we are looking forward to her return.”

With little recourse to a fair trial, families of Palestinian prisoners anxiously look forward to and even wish for a prisoner exchange situation to transpire.

Hundreds of Israelis, many of them civilians, were killed in the Hamas attack.

“Yet for many Palestinians what happened was not short of a miracle,” says Muhammad Al-Qiq, a political analyst and himself a former prisoner.

“Even the prisoners themselves who face long sentences were telling us that they dreamed of resistance fighters storming military installations and kidnapping soldiers to secure their liberation ,” he said.