Freed Palestinian prisoners welcome Gaza deal

On her first day of freedom, Bushra al-Tawil was enjoying her morning coffee and was eager for lunch when we arrived at her family’s apartment in Ramallah.

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

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

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

He has always been detained without charge, most recently since March 2024, except once when he was prosecuted for a speech he gave in a mosque.

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

This is not the first time that Bushra al-Tawil has participated in a prisoner exchange.

In 2011, Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who had been held hostage in Gaza for more than five years, was released along with 1,000 other Palestinian prisoners.

After this agreement, he was immediately arrested again by Israeli forces.

He said that during several arrests he was severely beaten, threatened to be shot in the leg and had a cigarette cut into his back.

In prison, he said, he was humiliated every day by the guards.

“The worst part was they didn’t let me wear my headscarf,” she said.

“And when we entered the prison, they stripped me.”

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

The bespectacled young journalism graduate is a conservative Muslim.

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

He is the former mayor of the town of al-Bireh on the outskirts of 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 him if he had any sympathy for the three Israeli hostages, young women like him, who were freed in Gaza on Sunday after more than a year of captivity by Hamas.

“We need to come home, and they need to come home,” he said.

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

The first phase of the ceasefire agreement is expected to release another thirty Israeli hostages in exchange for an additional 1,800 Palestinian prisoners.

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

He is likely to be deported outside of Israel and the Palestinian Territories to countries such as Qatar and Turkey.

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

Many, like Bushra, were not charged at all and held in Israeli prisons under so-called “administrative detention,” a process that human rights groups have strongly condemned.

The Israeli military argues that it is often unable to disclose details of the charges people face, nor to reveal the identities of informants to detainees and their lawyers for security reasons.