One name stands out in the current negotiations between Hamas and Israel over a ceasefire. It represents one of the keys to another exchange of hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails: Marwan Barghouti, 64, who has been in prison in Israel since 2002 serving five life sentences. “I am optimistic,” Fadwa Barghouti, his wife, said Tuesday in Ramallah, the administrative capital of the West Bank, with a smile and without offering any further assessment.
The leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, has called for the release of the best-known Palestinian prisoner, despite Barghouti representing Fatah, the formation that competes with the Islamist movement in the Palestinian power structure. For the Israeli authorities, Barghouti is a terrorist. For many Palestinians, he is a hero capable of uniting the different factions — secular or religious — of a people shaken by the war and the resignation of a government in crisis. His cellmates, now released and who have provided their testimony in this report, go even further: they directly idolize him. Not in vain, some consider him the Palestinian Nelson Mandela.
The Israeli prison authorities are holding Barghouti in solitary confinement while maintaining contacts in Paris, Cairo, and Doha to agree on a new ceasefire. His family estimates that this decision became effective in mid-December. “My father has been kept for 12 days in one of those isolation cells in Rimonim prison, with bright lights and loudspeakers blaring, spouting slogans in Hebrew,” denounces Arab Barghouti, 33, the youngest of the four sons. The restrictions also come in the form of less food, less water, less hygiene or less clothing, he says during an interview with EL PAÍS in front of a large portrait of his father next to another of Mandela.
Israel’s Minister of National Security, the controversial ultranationalist Itamar Ben-Gvir, took responsibility and boasted of the tightening of conditions on Barghouti. “Today they transferred Marwan Barghouti from Ofer prison to solitary confinement due to reports of a planned riot,” he said on social media on February 14. That alleged call for violence, to which some Israeli media referred, did not come from his father, says Arab Barghouti. “From Ben-Gvir we expect nothing,” he concludes.
In Ofer prison, his hands were cuffed behind his back and he injured his arm a few weeks ago, adds Arab. In almost three months of isolation, his father’s movement between Israeli prisons located both in Palestine and Israel has been constant, his son says: “From Ofer to Ramleh, then Rimonim, back to Ramleh, then Maggido,” according to the latest information the family has. Arab has had no direct contact with his father for 22 years and his wife, Fadwa, has not been allowed to visit him for over a year. His lawyer was able to spend some time with him at the end of January. Nevertheless, the family remains optimistic as it follows the negotiations behind the scenes but “the priority is to stop the genocide in Gaza and the release of all political prisoners,” not just his father, Arab says.
Abdelqader Badawi, 29, was imprisoned by Israeli authorities as a teenager for resisting the occupation in the streets. He was behind bars from 2012 to 2019, and between 2016 and 2018 spent several periods in solitary confinement in a cell with Barghouti. “He has had a great influence on me. He is a human being, a teacher, a friend… He welcomed me in prison with a smile. He is a sea of generosity,” he says while showing a photo of the two taken in prison in 2017.
Thanks to Barghouti, whom he calls “the doctor,” and his insistence that they should be educated, Badawi recalls, he earned his high school diploma and two degrees from Al Quds University. “Marwan Barghouti is certainly the solution. I believe he can achieve a unity government with all factions and political tendencies,” he says from his office at Madar, the Fatah-linked think tank where he works.
The war that broke out on October 7 has shaken the earth at all levels. On that day, Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2006, killed some 1,200 people in Israel in the worst attack in the country’s 75-year history. The Israeli army’s response has already resulted in the deaths of over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza alone. Domestically, Hamas’ popularity has steadily increased to the detriment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), whose interim government, since the former administration’s resignation on February 26, is led by Fatah.
Future president?
But Barghouti remains the most highly rated figure in a possible presidential race, whether he faces incumbent President Mahmoud Abbas or Ismail Haniyeh, according to the latest poll published in December by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR).
After nearly two decades without a vote, “there has to be a presidential election and the Palestinians have to choose who they want as their leader,” says Arab Barghouti. “The impact that Marwan Barghouti can have is that he can be a symbol for unity, the fight against corruption and against the occupation,” he adds, criticizing the internal division, the bad reputation surrounding the Palestinian leadership and the Israeli yoke. But he acknowledges that he is not sure whether his father would put himself forward in the race for the Palestinian leadership at this time.
Barghouti, who attempted to launch a candidacy from his prison cell in the 2021 elections that were eventually not held, was on the list of prisoners to be released when, in 2011, Israel exchanged over 1,000 Palestinian inmates for the soldier Guilad Shalit, who had been held hostage in Gaza for five years. In the end, he was left out of the agreement, but Yahya Sinwar — today the head of Hamas in Gaza and Israel’s most-wanted man as the mastermind of the October 7 attacks — was released.
Abdelqader Badawi laughs and remains silent when asked about the current president, Abbas, who is increasingly under fire. “I’m not going to answer,” he says. “We need a leadership that will take us on the path of rebuilding the PA” because “unfortunately, politics has had no steam in the last two decades.” He notes that the circumstances today are very different from those that landed Barghouti in jail in 2002 at the height of the second Intifada, in which he was even accused of carrying out assassinations. Today, Badawi says, the focus must be on ending the “bloodbath in Gaza.”
“If it depends only on Israel, Barghouti will not get out, but we have to watch the negotiations and how Hamas plays its cards,” says Abdelfatah Doleh, who was imprisoned between 2006 and 2011, a period in which he also shared a cell with Barghouti. “If Hamas thinks about the good of all Palestinians, it needs Barghouti,” adds Doleh, spokesman for one of the Fatah factions and another of those who places the most famous Palestinian prisoner on a pedestal.
Hamas “needs Barghouti because there is a lot of pressure on the Islamists at the international level” after October 7 and it “knows that after the war it will be very difficult to manage and lead Gaza again and rebuild it, so Barghouti can be of help,” says Sari Orabi, a political analyst and writer who, as a member of Hamas, spent five years in Israeli jails and three in PA prisons. Now in the “neutral” zone and without direct contact with the leadership of the Islamist movement to “avoid going back to prison,” Orabi believes that it was the upper echelons of Fatah who closed the way to Barghouti’s release in 2011 and who tried to corner those who supported him in 2021 with the formation he was planning to present in the elections.
Luis de Vega
“Barghouti is for many the solution, but not for me.” Nashaat Aqtash, professor at Birzeit University and collaborator in the Hamas electoral campaign in the most recent elections, in 2006, goes against the grain with the rest of those consulted for this report. He sees Barghouti as having many supporters among the new batch of Fatah members, but not among the veteran leaders. He believes that, despite the war, international pressure against the Islamists, and the polls, neither Abbas nor Barghouti would win a presidential election against a Hamas candidate.
Surrounded by posters of the late President Yasser Arafat in one of Fatah’s headquarters, veteran activist Haifaa Qudsia, 68, fears that Israel will want to exile Barghouti overseas once he is released, but believes that he will still maintain his leadership role. “The only way out for Hamas in the current circumstances is Marwan Barghouti,” she says. Others, like Abdelqader Badawi, cling to sentences learned as a mantra behind bars from his teacher and cellmate: “The last day of occupation will be the first day of peace.”
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