Released Palestinian prisoner celebrates Gaza deal

On her first day of freedom, Bushra al-Tawil was enjoying morning coffee and looking forward to lunch when we arrived at the family apartment in Ramallah.

“In prison it was just hummus, hummus, hummus. Now I can eat something different,” he joked.

In the kitchen, there were hugs from family and friends, her mother sitting at the table watching, happy that her only daughter was finally home as a result of the Gaza ceasefire deal that saw Hamas begin releasing hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons on Sunday.

The 32-year-old journalist has spent more than five years in Israeli prisons at different times.

She has always been detained without charge, the last time since March 2024, except on one occasion when she was prosecuted for a speech she gave in a mosque.

“I’m a journalist,” he said. “I have the right to express myself.”

This is not the first time that Bushra al-Tawil has been part of a prisoner exchange.

In 2011, she was freed along with 1,000 other Palestinian prisoners as part of the deal to free Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was held hostage in Gaza for more than five years.

Shortly after that agreement, Israeli forces quickly arrested her again.

She said that during her various arrests she was brutally beaten, threatened with being shot in the leg and having a cigarette stubbed out on her back.

In prison, she said, guards humiliated her daily.

“The worst thing was that they didn’t allow me to wear the scarf on my head,” she said.

“And when we first entered the prison, they made me strip naked.”

Israel’s prison service has said all prisoners are treated according to the law.

The young journalism graduate with glasses is a conservative Muslim.

In the living room, on the wall is a photograph of his father, Jamal al-Tawil, a prominent Hamas politician in the occupied West Bank.

He is a former mayor of the village of al-Bireh, outside Ramallah. He has spent more than 19 years in an Israeli prison.

I asked Bushra if he supported Hamas.

“I don’t want to be arrested again,” he said, refusing to answer.

I also asked her if she had any sympathy for the three Israeli hostages, young women like her, who were freed Sunday from more than a year of Hamas captivity in Gaza.

“We have to go home and they have to go home,” he said.

“The hostages meant I got out. As long as there are hostages, prisoners like me will get their freedom.”

Thirty more Israeli hostages are expected to be freed in the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, in exchange for some 1,800 more Palestinian prisoners.

Some of those prisoners have been convicted of much more serious crimes, including multiple murders.

They are likely to be deported out of Israel and the Palestinian Territories, to countries such as Qatar and Türkiye.

But all of the Palestinians freed on Sunday, including several children, were convicted of relatively minor crimes.

Many, like Bushra, were never charged with any charges and were held in Israeli prisons under what is called “administrative detention,” a process strongly condemned by human rights groups.

Israel’s military argues that it often cannot reveal details of the charges people face, even to detainees and their lawyers, for security reasons, to avoid revealing the identities of informants.