The evening Basim Khandakji’s novel gained the 2024 “Arabic Booker Prize”, Israeli jail guards stormed his cell, assaulted him, certain his fingers and toes, and threatened him.
The 42-year-old was then positioned in Ofer Jail’s solitary confinement for 12 days.
It was retaliation, he believes, for embarrassing the Israeli jail system, managing to publish a e book below the noses of guards, drawing consideration to himself and the situations he confronted.
Now he’s out of Israeli jail after serving 21 years of three life sentences.
“I nonetheless really feel like I’m dreaming, and I’m terrified I would get up and discover myself again in a cell,” Khandakji mentioned.
After his launch, he stays unable to return dwelling to his household in Nablus. Exiled from his homeland by Israel, he now waits in Egypt as his household fights to succeed in him.
‘We noticed new horrors’
As completely happy as he’s about escaping “the cemetery of the residing” in Israeli prisons, Khandakji continues to be making an attempt to course of the horrors that he noticed there and his disappointment at leaving different prisoners behind.
He was convicted in 2004 of being a part of a “navy cell” and being concerned in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, against the law he says he was compelled to admit to.
“The lawyer informed me I needed to signal a confession … in order that three younger males might be spared life sentences. There was a sort of quid professional quo: You admit to a selected cost in trade for getting some youthful males out of life sentences, and that’s what occurred.”
The United Nations estimates that not less than 75 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023, and organisations like B’Tselem and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights have revealed systematic abuse.
Khandakji spent months at a time in solitary confinement and was typically moved between prisons, spending time in most of Israel’s 19 amenities that maintain Palestinians – every as “hellish” because the final, he tells Al Jazeera.
“There are deliberate insurance policies of hunger, abuse, psychological and bodily torture, fixed humiliation, and intentional medical neglect.”
Photographs of launched Palestinian detainees have prompted outrage around the globe. Showing match and wholesome in photographs of them earlier than incarceration, on launch, many had been decreased to emaciated, cadaverous shadows of their former selves.
Issues modified, Khandakji says, after October 7, 2023 – the date of a Hamas-led assault throughout which 1,139 folks died in Israel and a few 250 have been taken captive, in response to which Israel launched a two-year genocidal conflict on Gaza.
Khandakji says prisoners started to die with surprising regularity, with guards utilizing “new horrific strategies” – significantly on detainees rounded up by the a whole lot from Gaza.
“Inmates noticed guards hanging up the our bodies of lifeless prisoners in cells and leaving them there, decaying,” he mentioned.
“One other informed me he noticed greater than 12 lifeless our bodies packed into cells at al-Jalama detention centre.”
Khandakji says the harrowing reminiscences of lifeless Palestinians and the brutal torture he witnessed and skilled will hang-out him for his complete life.
“The primary technique authorities used to interrupt prisoners was hunger,” he mentioned. “There was additionally ‘cooling’, that means denial of clothes, blankets, or any heating throughout the bitter winter.
“There was additionally fixed beatings,” he added. “They use horrifying, savage strategies – concentrating on the top, neck, and backbone.”
Al Jazeera reached out to Israeli jail authorities for touch upon Khandakji’s accusations, however acquired no reply.
Communication with family and friends was banned, he added, and he was prevented from accessing information from the surface world – though he did obtain phrase of his father’s demise.
“I used to be disadvantaged of my father whereas he was alive, and after his demise I used to be denied the prospect to bury him,” he mentioned.
Almost 9,000 Palestinians stay in Israeli jails, many taken in mass roundups, and greater than 3,500 are held below “administrative detention”, which Israel created to justify imprisoning folks indefinitely with out cost or trial.
Smuggling out an award-winning novel
In jail, Khandakji says: “Writing gave me … a refuge, a hiding place by way of which I might escape the brutality of the jail and reclaim my freedom, even when solely in my creativeness.”
He needed to go on starvation strike repeatedly to get notebooks and pens.
He wrote as a lot as he might, conserving his manuscripts hidden from the guards and staying out of their method till he might smuggle his writing out through his lawyer or every other customer.
In 2023, his award-winning novel, A Masks, The Color of the Sky, was revealed in Lebanon in Arabic and was shortlisted for the Worldwide Prize for Arabic Fiction, often known as the Arabic Booker.
The e book tells the story of Nur, a Palestinian archaeologist who finds an Israeli ID and takes on the identification of “Ur”, ultimately becoming a member of an archaeological dig on an unlawful Israeli settlement.
In it, Khandakji displays on the uncovering of Palestine’s antiquity and the distinction between the constrained lifetime of Nur together with his Palestinian ID and Ur, whose sky-blue ID allowed him to go anyplace.
Listening to of the shortlisting, an enraged ultranationalist Israeli nationwide safety minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, demanded harsher situations for Khandakji, whereas others on the Israeli excessive proper known as for his homicide.
His award triumph included a $50,000 prize and funding for an English translation, paving the best way for a worldwide readership.
When Israel launched its conflict on Gaza, situations grew to become worse within the jail, and guards confiscated Khandakji’s writing materials and smashed his studying glasses.
He felt “fully powerless”, he says. “Being disadvantaged of my pens and notebooks felt like being disadvantaged of air.”
Now free, he goals to publish one other novel, which he wrote in his head in his ultimate yr of captivity. It’s based mostly on one in all his closest mates, author Walid Daqqa, who died of most cancers after allegedly deliberate medical neglect by jail authorities.
Other than writing, Khandakji’s solely solace in jail was the friendships he made “that even demise can not erase”.
“I reside with sorrow and ache as a result of I left behind so many mates in jail, nonetheless struggling,” he provides.
Considered one of these mates, with whom he shared a cell, was Fatah politician Marwan Barghouthi, sentenced to 5 life sentences plus 40 years in 2004.
Barghouthi is usually in comparison with South African anti-apartheid chief Nelson Mandela, resulting from his a long time behind bars as a political prisoner and the unifying reputation he has amongst Palestinians.
“Marwan Barghouthi is a superb man,” he mentioned. “If he have been launched, he might develop into a unifying nationwide determine.”
The 66-year-old was overwhelmed unconscious final month by Israeli jail authorities, and his son, Arab, informed worldwide media his father fears for his life as Israel continues to disregard worldwide requires his launch.
His homeland lives inside him
Khandakji was arrested in 2004, on the age of 21, whereas in his ultimate yr of a journalism and political science diploma at An-Najah Nationwide College in his hometown of Nablus.
Raised in a household of socialists, Khandakji grew to become energetic within the Palestinian Individuals’s Occasion as an adolescent. He’s now an elected member of the celebration’s political bureau.
However throughout the second Intifada within the early 2000s, he determined to affix the armed resistance within the Widespread Entrance for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Wanting again, he says: “Ultimately, violence in all its kinds is inhuman.
“As human beings, we must always first attempt to clear up our points by way of peaceable and civilised means,” Khandakji mentioned. “However when somebody tries to erase you – to annihilate you – your battle turns into one in all existence.
“But when time might return… I would search for different methods,” he provides, of in search of a distinct path, one which didn’t deprive him of his household for 21 years.
He was one in all 250 high-profile detainees freed by Israel on October 13 as a part of the United States-brokered Gaza ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel.
Israeli captives held by Hamas have been launched in trade for almost 2,000 Palestinian detainees, most of whom have been “disappeared” by Israel from Gaza, in line with the UN.
Khandakji described the evening of his launch as “terrifying”, including that his physique was shaking as he “knew the second of freedom had lastly come”.
When he handed the jail gates and his bus went south as a substitute of in the direction of Nablus, he knew his full freedom can be denied slightly longer.
“Being exiled out of your homeland is a burning, painful feeling,” he mentioned. “My first pleasure, first sorrow, and first goals have been all in my metropolis, Nablus.
“Palestinians, in contrast to others, don’t reside of their homeland – their homeland lives inside them,” he mentioned.
For now, Khandakji will proceed writing and plans to pursue a PhD after reaching a grasp’s diploma in Israeli research whereas imprisoned.
His household is preventing desperately to reunite with him in Egypt, solely to be repeatedly thwarted by Israel.
“I nonetheless hope that within the coming interval, there will probably be some human justice that enables me to embrace my mom,” he says.
“Not as a freed prisoner – however merely as a baby looking for the scent of his childhood in his mom’s arms.”
