The Unbreakable Nael Barghouti
After 45 years in Israeli captivity, the longest-held Palestinian prisoner speaks about his fight for liberation: “We deserve a state under the sun.”
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“I never lost hope, and I never will,” said Nael Barghouti, a 68-year-old Palestinian from the occupied West Bank who spent more than four decades in Israeli captivity. It has been a year since Barghouti won his freedom through a prisoner exchange deal signed between Hamas and Israel in January 2025. As a condition of his release, Barghouti had to agree to go into exile and was deported to Egypt a month later. “I have been optimistic from the very first day I began my struggle,” he said. “In prison, I was optimistic that I would be free one day. And, even if I were to die in prison, I would remain content, because those who come after me will continue the path, because they are convinced that we are in the right.”
According to the most recent and reliable statistics, there are approximately 9,300 Palestinians currently held in Israeli captivity. Nearly half of these have not been charged or brought to trial. Additionally, there are an unknown number of Palestinians held in military camps run by the Israeli army. At least 87 Palestinians have been killed inside Israeli prisons since October 7, 2023, including several documented cases of death by torture, abuse, or intentional neglect. “Without any prior warning, a prisoner is detained with no charge—a 15 year old [boy], or a woman. Malicious arrest—arrest simply to send a lesson to entire generations. They are received with beatings, bone‑breaking, and the spread of infectious diseases,” Barghouti told Drop Site.
In a wide-ranging, in-person interview in Istanbul, Barghouti reflected on his time in Israeli captivity, the torture he endured alongside other Palestinian prisoners, and why he believes the Palestinian cause will ultimately triumph. “We are not seekers of blood or wars, but we will accept nothing other than defending ourselves and our rights,” Barghouti said. “Why is it forbidden for Palestinians to live like any other people—to leave when they wish, return when they wish, go to the sea when they wish? Personally, I have seen the sea only once, in a prison transport vehicle, and when I was released. The sea is thirty kilometers (18 miles) from my village—why? Why are olive trees hundreds of years old uprooted? Why do settlers go to villages to uproot trees, attack people, and kill their animals? Why does the occupation prevent the families of released prisoners from leaving to meet them?”
In the struggle for Palestinian liberation, political prisoners occupy a space of immense national pride and importance. They are widely seen as heroes of the cause, and they participate in the decision-making process for the factions to which they belong. “Palestinian prisoners in the occupation’s prisons are one of the most respected and esteemed groups among the Palestinian people—regardless of which faction the prisoner belongs to,” said Husam Badran, who spent 14 years in Israeli prisons and is currently Hamas’s head of national relations. He told Drop Site, “I believe there is hardly a Palestinian household that does not have a Palestinian prisoner. In some families, the father, mother, and children are sometimes all inside prison at the same time. We are talking about a long experience since [the Arab-Israeli war of] 1967; we are talking about a period of almost sixty years. We define ourselves as fighters for freedom—certainly not terrorists, as the occupation describes us.”
Badran, a former commander of Hamas’s armed wing Al Qassam Brigades in the West Bank, described how Hamas and other factions held democratic elections inside the prisons and remained intimately engaged in the broader decision making of their movements on the outside. “I wouldn’t trade the prison experience for all experiences in the world. It is bitter and difficult, true, but you gain a lot from it—on a human level, a personal level, and in understanding life. You cannot learn this anywhere else except in prison, despite how difficult it is. Your ability to innovate and invent [ways] to communicate surpasses imagination,” he said. “Yes, we studied, we learned, we went to university, we earned master’s degrees, because the Palestinian by nature has an extraordinary ability to confront hardship. The world is not capable of understanding that this is who the Palestinian is. This Palestinian today is part of the decision‑making body in the Palestinian cause. So how do you expect to break him? And how do you expect to impose international forces on him, take away his weapon, and bring [Tony] Blair to rule him? How could he accept that?,” Badran asked.
“The whole story is connected together. If you want to understand the current Palestinian situation by looking only at the last two years, you will not succeed in understanding the Palestinian cause—you will fail,” he added. “You must go back decades and study the Palestinian personalities and leaderships. So how do you expect to deal with this type of leadership—whether in Hamas or others—through submission, surrender, and raising the white flag?”
This week President Donald Trump pushed ahead with his Gaza Plan and announced the first round of appointments to his so-called Board of Peace. They include his son-in-law Jared Kushner, venture capitalists, ex-Prime Minister of the UK Tony Blair, and an assortment of non-Palestinian heads of state and political leaders, as well as business figures—some with close ties to Israel. “States want to sign agreements on behalf of the Palestinian people, but the Palestinian people did not authorize them and never will. Money will not tempt us, and airplanes will not frighten us. This resistance will continue until the Palestinian people return to their lands, and until American politicians regain their reason, along with everyone who supports this entity,” Barghouti said. He added, “Anyone who truly wants America to remain a state that upholds justice in the world must stand with the Palestinian people—not [submit] to the influence of a Zionist lobby that is damaging America more than it is damaging the rest of the world.”
“Our spirits and our will were not broken”
When he was freed last year, Barghouti was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner held by Israel. He spent more than 45 years behind bars—nearly 34 of them consecutively. In 2009, the Guiness Book of World Records certified him as “the longest serving political prisoner ever.” The previous record was also held by a Palestinian, Said Alatabah, who served more than 31 years before being released in 2008.
As a ten year old boy, Barghouti witnessed Israeli forces invade his family’s West Bank village of Kobar, near Ramallah, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war as Israel began its decades-long occupation. Barghouti began his anti-occupation actions by joining other youth in throwing stones and writing graffiti on walls. He came from a family with deep roots in Palestinian resistance. “My uncle was imprisoned during the British occupation and the beginning of the Zionist entity. My father was imprisoned twice during the occupation, as were my mother, brother, sister, wife, and many other family members,” Barghouti said. “We come from a family that rejects the occupation. We lived in a simple village, but it was one that hosted refugees from [the Nakba in] 1948. We knew that these refugees had land, homes, and property, and that overnight they became poor people waiting for the United Nations to grant them some aid,” he added. “What we witnessed of the crimes of the occupation and its soldiers, and the humiliations, instilled in us a refusal to accept this occupation. From a very young age, since 1967, I saw my father being humiliated by soldiers while I was still a child—him being beaten in front of me by patrols.”
In 1977, Barghouti was arrested for the first time and spent three months in jail. In April 1978, just as he was preparing to complete his high school final exams, Barghouti was again arrested, along with his brother Omar and cousin Fakhri, but this time he was accused of being involved with the killing of a former Israeli paratrooper working as a bus driver. They also detained his father. “I was tortured in front of my father, and my father was tortured in front of me. They threatened to arrest my mother, and later they did arrest her,” Barghouti recalled.
In the end, he was hit with a life sentence plus 18 years. “We entered prison unjustly, were sentenced unjustly, and were assaulted unjustly,” he said. “We will not submit, and we will not be ashamed that we resisted—we will not disown our actions. Those who must disown their crimes are the leaders of the Zionist occupation.”
When Barghouti entered prison, he originally affiliated himself with Fatah, the party of the late Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat. In the 1990s, when Arafat signed the Oslo Accords and recognized Israel, Barghouti joined Hamas.
“The Palestinian people have been fighting for more than a hundred years. This is not tied to Hamas, Fatah, or any other organization. Every phase will have its own names and labels until the goals of the Palestinian people are achieved: return and self‑determination. This is a point that no Palestinian will ever abandon,” he said. “We entered prison and resisted the occupation, and we are not ashamed of that. It is the right of the Palestinian people—and of any people under occupation—to resist. The American people resisted British injustice. How did Ireland gain its freedom? Through the use of all forms of resistance.”
Inside the prison, Barghouti earned a reputation as a leader, organizer, and political thinker. He was a voracious reader of history books and studied foreign languages. As the years went by, he became known as the “Dean of the Palestinian Prisoners” and Abu Al-Noor, “Father of Light.” He often organized protests and strategized how to resist the prison authorities.
“We Palestinian prisoners entered prison at a time when the torture was the same as the torture that exists today. We carried out multiple [hunger] strikes with the support of our people. Sometimes the occupation wanted calm from us so that the Palestinian people would not rise up, so through our strikes, we achieved certain gains: the pen, the paper, the notebook, the book, and bedding—the blanket,” he said. “Everything inside the prisons was achieved through our [hunger] strikes. Our organization was disciplined because we are political prisoners: we do not accept living the life of a criminal prisoner.”
Over the decades, Barghouti was imprisoned with other high-profile Palestinians, including Yahya Sinwar, who would go on to become the leader of Hamas in Gaza and was one of the main architects of the October 7 attacks. Sinwar was killed in October 2024 in battle in Gaza. “If we wanted to speak about the martyred brother Yahya, I knew him and lived with him. He was among the most humane people I have ever known,” Barghouti said. He recalled how they both studied Hebrew, and that Sinwar had translated the memoirs of various Israeli intelligence chiefs from Hebrew to Arabic and encouraged other prisoners to study Israel’s history and tactics.
“We learned about Zionist life in prison through the Hebrew language—yes. We came to know them, and we came to know the extent of their criminality,” he said. “It should not be surprising that in prison we understood them, studied them, and came to know their criminality through their own books and through what they wrote in their press,” he added. “Sinwar and his brothers and comrades learned and understood that this enemy cannot coexist with this region as long as it carries a racist Zionist ideology. This is the truth.”
Sinwar and Barghouti were both released in 2011 as part of an exchange deal for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been taken captive by Hamas fighters in 2006. More than 1,000 Palestinians were freed in the deal. Sinwar, who was held more than 20 years in Israeli captivity, played a central role in negotiating the deal from inside prison.
Upon his release, Sinwar returned to Gaza and went on to become the political leader of Hamas. “He understood more deeply how to influence the occupation. And so, after leaving prison, it was in his mind that we must do something that makes this occupation reckon with its continued presence,” said Badran, who lived in the same cell with Sinwar for years. “He chose to set an example for all Palestinian leadership that the true leader is one who lives among his people—exposed to harm as they are, fights as they fight, is martyred as they are martyred, and goes hungry as they go hungry.”
As Sinwar rose to the leadership of Hamas in Gaza following his release from prison, Barghouti returned to his village of Kobar on October 18, 2011. After nearly 34 years in captivity, he tried to build a life in a world he had not inhabited for more than three decades. A month after winning his freedom, he married Iman Nafi, who had also served 10 years in prison, from 1987-1997. “Nael is a Palestinian hero. I have known of his heroism, his steadfastness and leadership in prison for many years. He is a special person. He belongs to a revolutionary school that is true and authentic and comes from the land itself. I have known so many details about his life, from what I have read and heard,” Nafi wrote in an essay published in the 2019 book, These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons. “When he came asking for my hand, I told my family that I agree without any hesitation.”
Like Barghouti, Nafi was arrested when she was still in high school. “As a freed prisoner, I consider my marriage to another freed prisoner a victory against prison, a challenge to those who deprived us of our freedom, and a triumph of the spirit of faith and hope,” Barghouti said on his wedding day. “The idea that Nael would be released from prison and he and I would be together gives the Palestinian people hope that we could all be free and happy,” Nafi said. Barghouti enrolled at Al Quds Open University and farmed his land along with his brother Omar, who was also released in the Shalit deal. “The world has changed and developed so much since I was gone. But the longer the occupation lasts, the worse things are,” Barghouti said soon after his release. “I am being welcomed not as a person, but as an idea, a symbol for Palestinians.”
On June 12, 2014, three Israeli settlers were abducted near an illegal settlement outside of Hebron. Israel accused Hamas of being responsible and launched a sweeping military action throughout the occupied West Bank, codenamed Operation Brother’s Keeper, and took more than 350 Palestinians prisoner. Among these were some 70 Palestinians released in the 2011 Shalit deal. On June 18, Israeli forces descended on Kobar and snatched Barghouti—claiming he had violated the terms of his release after he delivered a speech at Birzeit University and citing rumors that he was considering accepting a ministerial post in a possible unity government between Fatah and Hamas. Barghouti dismissed their justifications and charged he was snatched as another act of collective punishment.
Prosecutors, claiming to have secret evidence, sought to have his life sentence reinstated. A year later, a military court in Ofer Prison ruled the charges baseless that Barghouti had “committed a crime under the security laws,” but the court nonetheless sentenced him to 30 months in prison, claiming secret intelligence showed he was involved with “terrorist financing.” Barghouti was not permitted to see the alleged evidence. In 2017, again citing secret files, the military court reversed its decision and reimposed Barghouti’s original life sentence. He remained in captivity until Hamas and Israel signed a ceasefire deal in January 2025. He was freed from prison on the condition that he live in exile.
Barghouti, whose freedom was achieved through negotiations in the aftermath of Operation Al Aqsa Flood, recalls hearing the news of the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023. “Honestly, I felt the same feeling that the Israelis felt in 1967—how within six hours the Arab air force was destroyed and Arab land was occupied. [The Israelis] felt happiness and arrogance. I did not feel arrogance. Despite our limited and simple capabilities and [living] under siege—we don’t have F‑16s, we don’t have Patriot missiles—this arrogant army, which goes to Yemen and bombs Yemen, bombs Iraq, bombs Iran, was confronted by simple people coming out of the siege saying, ‘Enough,’” Barghouti remembered. “Yes, we took pride in it—yes. Even though we wish that this Flood had never had to happen—that we had already been free and had no need for such battles. But, tomorrow, there will be another flood, and another, until this occupation and this injustice come to an end.”
Barghouti also said that, soon after the October 7 attacks, the Israeli guards inside the prison began to intensify their abuse and torture of Palestinian prisoners. “Israeli policy against prisoners used every method of repression: beatings, humiliation, dogs, tear gas, stun grenades, and starvation. I personally lost 22 kilograms (48 pounds) in weight. I was deliberately poisoned more than three times—myself and those living with me in the same section,” he said. “It was intentional poisoning—some of the guards put substances in the food, and everyone who ate it suffered from diarrhea, and we received no medication. Those who contracted contagious diseases like scabies were taken to rooms with healthy prisoners so the disease would spread, and it spread intentionally and systematically. This demonstrates a fascist mindset.”
“Our hands, legs, and ribs were broken, but our spirits and our will were not broken,” Barghouti added. “Dogs fitted with iron collars were used against me more than once: they were given orders. My shoulders were broken. My blood covered my back—from iron shackles, from plastic restraints. Hunger. Cold—for two full months I walked barefoot in the cold. Barefoot,” he recalled. “The clothes I was wearing—the guards all called me ‘homeless.’ I believe there are photographs they took—they boasted about it. The food—they would kick it with their feet, spit on it, spit into the food. These are things that happened.”
Solidarity With Other Palestinian Prisoners
Since his release in February 2025, Barghouti has used his time advocating for the freedom of other prisoners, demanding that families of those forced into exile be allowed to reunite, and promoting the cause of Palestinian liberation. When he was freed, Israel denied his wife exit papers to join him in Egypt. According to the Palestinian Prisoners Society, Israel routinely blocks families from being reunited with their loved ones once they are freed and forced into exile, with the organization calling the Israeli practice “collective revenge.”
“Why, at this moment, are the families of Palestinian prisoners who were released under an agreement prevented from meeting their children? Why is this happening? Why are the wives, sons, and daughters of detainees prevented from joining their children in visits? Why?” Barghouti asked. “All prisoners who have been [exiled]—their families are punished by being forbidden to meet them.”
Since 1967, Israel has also maintained a practice of holding the bodies of Palestinians who die in prison and refusing to allow their families to bury them. Conservative estimates indicate there are more than 700 bodies held in numbered graves or refrigerators, though these estimates do not include many of the Palestinians killed in Gaza whose bodies were taken back to Israel since October 7. In one case, Israel has continued to hold the body of a Palestinian who died on hunger strike in prison in 1980. “There are dozens, even hundreds, of Palestinian victims to this day in numbered graves and in secret prisons, and the Red Cross is not allowed to see them. They trade in bodies, and this goes against everything that is human,” Barghouti said.
Barghouti’s thoughts are never far from his comrades still in captivity, including high-profile political prisoners like Marwan Barghouti, the single most popular Palestinian leader. “These prisoners, and dozens like them, are heroes of the Palestinian people,” he said. “But if these prisoners were to be tried under a fair legal system, they would not—and could not—have received the sentences they were given. I challenge international law: if it truly wants to resolve the issue of Palestinian detainees, it must review all their cases.”
Hanan Barghouti, Nael’s 60-year-old sister, has been “administratively detained” by Israeli forces three times without charge or trial in the past two years. A prominent organizer of mobilizations in support of Palestinian prisoners, Hanan was first detained in September 2023 and released in November 2023 as part of the “Flood of the Free” prisoner exchange during the temporary truce between Hamas and Israel. After her 2023 release, Hanan recalled how an Israeli officer threatened her against appearing in the media or allowing celebrations for her freedom, reminding her that four of her sons were also under administrative detention. She told Al-Araby’s Al-Jadeed that she confronted him as a “sadistic oppressor.” Reflecting on the cost of resistance, she said: “The price is heavy and painful, and there is a sea of blood, but this blood will water the land, and the land will bloom in all colors.”
She was then taken again by Israeli forces in March 2024 and held for nine months—an Israeli violation of the terms of the November 2023 exchange deal. On September 30, 2025, she was detained for a third time under a new administrative order and is being subjected to repression, abuse, and starvation in Israel’s Damon Prison, according to the Prisoners’ Media Office. Barghouti told Drop Site that Hanan was taken shortly after he spoke with her by phone.
“Today, my sister—my own sister—is in prison. Why? Because she spoke with me on the phone,” Barghouti said. “Can you imagine? She is taken under an administrative law dating back to the period of British occupation. My sister is [imprisoned] simply because she spoke with her brother. What justice is this?”
Israeli politicians have recently intensified their threats to begin executing Palestinian prisoners, and the conditions inside of the prisons have dramatically worsened as torture and extrajudicial killings have intensified since October 7. In November, the Israeli Knesset moved forward a bill introducing the death penalty for those it deems terrorists, a measure expected to apply almost exclusively to Palestinians living under occupation. The bill grants immunity to the state, allows death sentences without a prosecutor’s request, and imposes total isolation on those condemned. Passed in its first reading by 39–16, the vote was celebrated by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who wore a noose-shaped pin and declared that “terrorists will only be released to hell.”
Barghouti argues that the escalating abuse and torture and threats to begin executions, will foreclose meaningful negotiations toward a broader peace, given the importance of the prisoners to the Palestinian struggle. “They have left the prisoners’ file as a fuse for future confrontations. Release them, and I believe the region could enjoy a long period of calm. [These prisoners] are an inseparable part of the Palestinian struggle. Keep them imprisoned, and you will drive many generations, and the children of future generations, to struggle for their liberation, and the cycle will continue unchanged,” he said. “Stupidity is one of God’s soldiers deployed upon the minds of these criminals—it will ultimately contribute to the end of this entity. Part of their stupidity, animosity, and criminality will contribute to their downfall in front of the people of the world, not only in the eyes of our people.”
In striking ways, Barghouti’s life is a metaphor for the entire Palestinian struggle. “We endured beatings and humiliation, but our spirit and our will were not broken, and will never be broken by any torture. We endured because we were people of conviction. Even when we were prevented from praying, and forbidden from practicing our religious rituals, we prayed in secret—just as Christians once prayed in secret under the Byzantine and Roman empires when they were persecuted,” he said. “We held onto hope, we remain hopeful, and we will continue to hope. The jailer will never defeat us, no matter what methods he uses, because we are people of a just cause,” Barghouti added. “We deserve a state under the sun—a state with scientists, poets, writers, and artists, no less than any other country in the world.”
The Israelies are against a Palestinian state because it will be a constant reminder to them of the undeniable evil they have done to the Palestinian people.
Barghouti's history must be known by the powers that be. He had the longest imprisonment but not the only imprisonment and from his testimony for political reasons and not for crimes.
Political emprisonment is a crime in itself and must be denounced by all free and democratic nations.