Police even confiscated a tray of sweets from the family of Palestinian Amani Hashim, but she is so happy to have been able to take her children back to school for the first time in seven years that she tells it as just another anecdote. This is the time he spent behind bars until November 24, when a prison officer opened his cell and told him: “You’re going home, you have five minutes to prepare.” When Israeli prison authorities responded to the attack on November 7, As conditions for prisoners tightened on October 15th, for example by removing electronic devices and television time, he did not know that the newscasts that day began with a story that completely occupied his mind: Israel and Hamas were preparing to exchange hostages and prisoners as part of a ceasefire that spanned a week until it collapsed on Friday.
“Tears started flowing. So much so that my cellmates helped me pack. “I don’t want prison or my enemies,” said Hashim, who said goodbye with a Facebook post in 2016 before making his way to the Israeli military checkpoint of Kalandia between Jerusalem and Ramallah and accelerating toward a soldier. It resulted in “serious physical harm,” according to the Israeli Justice Ministry’s list of 300 minors and women potentially eligible for release under the exchange, two-thirds of whom have already dropped out. The car was full of bullets, but she was still alive and still serving a 10-year sentence, which she ended up serving three years ahead of schedule.
Hashim, 37, was released on Friday along with 23 other women and 15 minors. When he arrived at his home in East Jerusalem, he recalled, he experienced several surprises: how much his 10- and 11-year-old children had grown (the Covid epidemic has already limited prison visits) and how addicted everyone was their cell phones were telephones. Also with the fact that while Israel celebrated the return of its kidnapped people (which caused a national stir), dozens of its police officers ensured that no one in the neighborhood could set off fireworks, gather, play music, give speeches, or hand out candy . This is the norm in Palestine, where what Israel technically calls “security prisoners” are placed on a pedestal.
Hashim wipes it off and smiles from ear to ear. “Celebrating was important to me and no one could take that away from me. The renewed embrace of my family is not measured by the number of people celebrating with me,” he emphasizes. He claims police separated people and it took a while before he saw any of his children again. And that beforehand, in addition to the release document, they made him sign another one, with the conditions: it was forbidden to speak through a megaphone, it was forbidden to show Palestinian flags, it was forbidden to distribute sweets. “They made it clear to me that if I did, they would arrest me and my family again,” he adds, before recounting that his father told one of the agents: “You can’t stop me from eating Knafe .” [un dulce típico de la zona] in my house,” and he replied, “Yes, I can do that, and you’ll see.” In the end, the private family celebration was limited to the four walls, the room was secretly full and people tried not to raise their voices. It was, in his own words, a “bittersweet” celebration of the dead in Gaza.
Amani Hashim, this Wednesday in his home in the Beit Hanina neighborhood of East Jerusalem.Antonio Pita
Their neighborhood, Beit Hanina, is eight kilometers from the city of Jerusalem. After capturing it in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel incorporated it into the city in a controversial decision, tripling its size. It was annexed in the 1980s. That is why the Israeli police rule here today, avoiding the images of joy and jubilation for Hamas, which has welcomed former prisoners to West Bank areas under the administrative and security control of the Palestinian Authority, such as Ramallah.
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Both the police and prison service depend on the Ministry of Public Security, which was transformed into a broader national security ministry when the far-right Itamar Ben Gvir demanded his entry into Benjamin Netanyahu’s government last December. Ben Gvir – a friend of demagogic and effective measures – met last week with a view to exchanging ideas with the heads of the departments under his authority. “My instructions are clear: that there must be no expressions of joy. “Victory celebrations support these human scum, these Nazis,” he said, according to his office. Correctional Services Director Katy Perry has been ordered to stop any attempt to get prisoners to say goodbye to their former colleagues while they are still in prison. And the police, Kobi Shabtai, have an “iron hand” against any attempt at a party or expression of joy, as well as police reinforcements in the neighborhoods where former prisoners are returning.
A wall that is too green
Eyad Aawar bursts into laughter as he points out where the “iron hand” went. He says that before his teenage children Qassam and Nasrallah returned home, the police forced him to whitewash some graffiti on an outside wall to announce (as is customary in the Arab world) that a family member had made a pilgrimage there Mecca. “It bothered them that there was so much green,” he says. It is the color of both Islam and the flag of Hamas, the Islamist movement that killed around 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 200 on October 7, sparking the current war. Beneath the white paint, one can see the silhouette of the Kaaba, the stone that surrounds pilgrims at the holiest place for Muslims. He also had to remove old decorations left over from Ramadan six months ago.
Exterior wall of the Eyad Aawar House in East Jerusalem, which the family had to paint white.Antonio Pita
18-year-old Qassam and minor Nasrallah were arrested in July 2022 for throwing a Molotov cocktail at a settler bus. The first received a prison sentence of 26 months; the second, 30, for this and other crimes, such as supporting terrorism or inciting violence with a nationalist basis, according to the Justice Department list. The two are named after the historic Arab leader after whom Hamas’s armed wing is named and the top leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, respectively. Exactly the two largest armed groups fighting Israel today.
The father picked her up from the – these days highly protected – police station on the Russian compound in West Jerusalem. “A police officer sat on the table and started making all sorts of threats against me. To tell me that we couldn’t gather people, we couldn’t hand out candy, and especially we couldn’t set off fireworks. That he would make sure I was sunk if we did.”
Already in Silwán (East Jerusalem), the agents approached the house and informed them that they did not want to hold a single celebration between the door leading to the building and the fence of the compound. “They insisted that only immediate relatives were allowed entry. A drone even flew by to make sure there were no crowds. They took over the neighborhood, even with gunmen, as if this were Jenin or Gaza,” he says.
Today, the two released teenagers are receiving hugs from family, neighbors and acquaintances they didn’t have that day. The living room of his house in the Silwán district is full of people coming and going. Nasrallah, wearing a pendant from historic Palestine (modern-day Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and his native East Jerusalem), began dreaming of his release when new prisoners who arrived in the wave of arrests after October 7 told him What they didn’t know was what they expected: that Hamas and Islamic Jihad took numerous hostages in Israel that day. He never knew he was on the list of 300 possible releases (he just found out it existed), but on the first day of the exchange he suddenly saw several inmates disappear from other cells. On November 26, a guard told him, “Hey, you’re going home! But when I see you on TikTok, you get your medicine!”
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