Palestinian prisoners: Beyond labels, a struggle for dignity and freedom

IMAGINE not knowing where your loved one is.

Not knowing when they will return or if they will return at all. No trial date to wait for. No sentence to count down. Just absence, stretched across days, months, sometimes years.

Now imagine that even in death, there is no goodbye. No burial. No closure. Only the quiet, ongoing weight of not knowing.

For many Palestinian families, this is not hypothetical. It is everyday life.

“My work is with children. I am a paediatrician.” These were the words of Dr. Husam Abu Safiya as he walked out of the ruins of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, toward a line of tanks surrounding the building. Still in his white coat, he stepped forward alone, a moment captured in an image that quickly travelled across the world.

Within hours, he was arrested.

Since then, he has been detained without formal charges, his detention repeatedly extended, his fate uncertain.

At first glance, this may appear as another fragment of a larger conflict — a moment that passes through the news cycle before being replaced by the next.

But what happens when we pause, and look more closely? Years earlier, another image captured global attention.

A 13-year-old boy, Ahmad Manasra, lay bleeding in the street after being beaten and run over by Israeli settlers in Jerusalem.

He survived.

But survival did not mean freedom. He was later charged and sentenced, despite not carrying out the act he was accused of being involved in.

He was released at 23 years old, having developed schizophrenia after prolonged detention and isolation.

These are not isolated stories. They are part of a much larger reality one that stretches across families and generations.

Consider Nael Barghouti, who spent 45 years in detention before being released in 2025. Nearly half a century, longer than many people have been alive. A life measured not in milestones, but in years behind bars.

Others remain imprisoned, facing sentences that stretch beyond comprehension. Abdullah Barghouti has been sentenced to 67 life terms, while Ibrahim Hamed is serving 54.

What do these numbers represent when viewed beyond their legal form? Since 1967, over one million Palestinians have been detained. Today, more than 9,900 remain in prisons and detention centres. Among them are hundreds of children and women, many held without clear charges or timelines.

These realities do not exist in isolation, but within the framework of a decades-long occupation in Palestine, where the application of law itself is deeply questioned.

One of the least understood aspects of this reality is “administrative detention”, the practice of holding individuals without charge or trial, often based on undisclosed evidence.

Within such a framework, this raises fundamental questions. In most legal systems, justice is expected to be visible, explainable, and accountable. But when individuals are detained without being told why, uncertainty itself becomes part of the punishment, extending beyond the detainee to the families waiting outside.

And sometimes, even loss does not bring resolution.

For decades, hundreds of Palestinian bodies have been withheld, denying families the basic right to bury their loved ones. In such cases, grief is not a moment of closure, but an ongoing condition, a psychological burden carried without an ending.

And then comes what many would see as the breaking point, the final straw.

After decades of mass arrests under occupation in Palestine, the death penalty marks a dangerous escalation.

If the existing reality has already stretched the limits of what many consider just, this development raises an even more urgent question: what happens when a system — already contested in its legality — is also given the power to take life? To many, this is no longer only about imprisonment. It is about the expansion of authority over life and death within a framework where justice itself remains deeply debated.

Yet these realities rarely sit at the centre of global narratives.

Instead, the focus often narrows to moments of violence, framed through the language of security and response. Context becomes selective. Some stories are expanded, while others remain compressed or absent altogether.

Lost in this framing is the historical context that underpins Palestinian claims to land, identity, and freedom, without which present events are stripped of meaning.

This brings us to one of the most contested aspects of the conversation: how Palestinian prisoners are defined.

In much of global discourse, they are often reduced to a single label one largely shaped by the occupying power, framing them exclusively through the lens of terrorism. But this framing is neither neutral nor complete.

In this context, such labels cannot be separated from the conditions in which they are assigned.

For many Palestinians, these individuals are not abstract figures defined solely by accusation. They are part of a lived reality. People whose lives are intertwined with a broader struggle for land, dignity, and self-determination.

This is why some describe them not only as prisoners, but as hostages; held without charge, without trial, and without a clear path to release.

At the same time, within Palestinian society, these individuals are remembered differently.

History reminds us that the line between “terrorist” and “freedom fighter” has never been fixed. It has shifted across time, shaped by perspective and power. The Irish struggle for independence, for instance, was once widely framed through the language of insurgency. Over time, that framing evolved and with it, global sympathy.

The events did not change.

The lens did.

So why do some struggles become understood, while others remain distant? Part of the answer lies not only in what is happening, but in how it is presented and how often certain aspects are left out.

In the case of Palestinian prisoners, the broader reality — mass arrests, child detention, indefinite imprisonment, lives shaped behind bars, and families left waiting — exists alongside the headlines, but rarely within them.

This is where the role of the reader becomes essential.

To look beyond the immediate framing.

To question what is emphasised and what is missing.

To recognise that every number carries a story.

Because understanding Palestine is not only about following events as they unfold.

It is about learning how to see them and recognising that what we see is often shaped by the lens through which the story is told.

And in seeing differently, we are also called to remember.

Not only the numbers but the names.

Not only the accusations but the lives.

Not only the years taken but the meaning given to those years.

Through one lens, they are reduced to headlines, to charges, to labels that begin and end the story before it is fully understood.

But through another lens — shaped by lived reality, memory, and history — a different picture begins to take form.

Lives suspended behind prison walls, yet still moving quietly through the memory of a people.

Years taken, yet reshaped into a language of endurance.

Absence that lingers, until it becomes a presence of its own — woven into identity, into struggle, into belonging.

And so, under this lens, they are not seen as prisoners.

They are seen as those who endured.

Those who refused to fade.

Those who carried the weight of a nation’s story through the slow passage of time.

They are remembered as heroes.

They are not only remembered. They are carried.

Revda Selver Iseric is a PR and Media Executive at Friends of Palestine (FoP), focusing on digital media literacy, public narratives and advocacy for Palestine.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Sinar Daily.