To our friends,

At its core, the Palestinian liberation movement is an abolitionist struggle. The Zionist occupation has long used the prison to quash dissent, abducted Palestinians without cause and subjected them to relentless interrogation, torture, and solitary confinement. 

But the carceral system is also Palestine’s foremost site of popular resistance. From the pits of Zionist dungeons, Palestinian prisoners have produced some of the most vital works of the liberation struggle, written by heroes like Walid Daqqa and Khalida Jarrar. 

“The prisoner’s movement continues to be the only stable movement in an ocean of instability,” Basil Farraj, a scholar of the prisoner’s movement at Birzeit University, told The New York War Crimes in an interview. The political fragmentation that pitted Hamas and Fatah against each other made it such that the prison was the only site around which Palestinians could find unity in struggle. “Every library in Palestine has a prison literature section.”

The Palestine movement recognizes October 7 as a prison break enacted by captives, young men who’d spent their lives living under siege in an open air prison. They aimed to put the Palestinian cause back on the global stage at a time when Arab governments were normalizing with Israel and conditions in the occupied lands were deteriorating. 

The prisoner releases which took place after the now-defunct ceasefire deal was enacted in January elevated the Palestinian prisoner’s movement in the global consciousness and reaffirmed its centrality to the liberation struggle. 

D. Musa Springer wrote about the recent prisoner releases in Mondoweiss: 

"This process has not only been about individuals coming home from Zionist gulags, though that is probably the primary cause of excitement. This was a display of a community reaffirming their commitment to their freedom fighters in every sense of the term: those in the prisons, those on the frontlines, and the many more simply caught in between a colonial system designed for their destruction and a liberation war.

Prisoners are the north star of our movement. Their strength is our strength. From behind the walls of Israeli prisons and black sites, they refine the movement’s thinking, they strategize, they survive. 

In today’s edition of the Bulletin, you will meet some of the recently freed prisoners, learn about the sham of Israel’s “administrative detention” and get more context on the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil. 

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W.A.W.O.G. Events

• Join the Palestinian Youth Movement for a Prisoner solidarity panel and Know Your Rights training. Saturday, April 19. RSVP here.

• Join W.A.W.O.G.’s Philadelphia chapter for "Free the People, Free the Land"— a town hall centering the rights to return, resist, and remain. Tuesday, April 22. RSVP here.

Nael al-Barghouti: “Resistance is the path to salvation” 

Nael al-Barghouti, the longest-serving political prisoner in Palestinian history, was born in 1957 in the village of Kobar, near Ramallah. Revolt is in his blood: When the occupation army invaded Kobar during the 1967 Naksa, his family threw stones at the soldiers from the roof of their home. 

A decade later, while he was preparing for his high school exams, Barghouti was arrested along with his brother Omar and cousin Fakhri. The three were accused of killing an occupation soldier and sentenced to 112 years. 

Barghouti’s mother used to visit Nael and Omar in prison. Her name is Farha, which means “joy” in Arabic, but a guard purposely pronounced her name as “Farkha,” which means “chicken,” to taunt her. In response, she told the guard, “Thank God I gave birth to roosters who will pick your eyes.”

In 2011, after serving 34 consecutive years, Nael, along with Yahya Sinwar,  was one of several prisoners freed by the resistance in the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal. Barghouti returned to his home town of Kobar, near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, and began pursuing his studies in history at Al-Quds Open University. In 2014, Israel re-arrested Nael and reinstated his previous life sentence, citing a “secret file” that was never revealed. 

Barghouti — known to his fellow prisoners as  “Abu Al-Noor,” or “Father of Light” — was released from Zionist captivity on January 27, 2025 as part of the “Flood of the Free” exchange deal made possible by the resistance. He was immediately deported to Egypt. Before his departure, he was not allowed to visit his wife, Eman, whom he hasn’t seen in a decade. “It’s joy when we see them freed, but [the joy is] incomplete because of what is happening in Gaza — the destruction and massacres,” Eman, herself a former political prisoner, said in January. 

Speaking to the press after his release, Barghouti said, “For our people, resistance is the path to salvation… It is a partnership between those who sacrificed their blood and those who sacrificed their years so that this nation may one day live in freedom and dignity and Palestine be liberated. Our people take pride in their fighters, their heroes, and above all, in Gaza, which has made immense sacrifices.”

Free them all!

Administrative detention is the Israeli practice of holding Palestinian detainees without charge or trial. A single administrative detention decree can last six months, but there is no limit to the number of times the same person may be detained, in continuity or with some breaks. And so administrative detention often means indefinite imprisonment without trial or charge, for thousands of Palestinians.

Zionist forces inherited this method of warfare from their British patrons who used it against Palestinians (including women and children) even before the Nakba. Neither the administrative detainees nor their lawyers are allowed to see the “secret evidence” that forms the basis for their arrests. In January 2025, more than ten thousand Palestinians were being held under administrative detentions across the occupied territories, the highest amount ever recorded. Even in ‘48 Palestine, where the occupation often attempts to sustain a thin facade of democracy, administrative detention has proliferated, mostly leveraged against Palestinians the regime characterizes as outspoken or critical.

The occupation grants any Israeli district commander the authority to issue an administrative detention order with little to no evidence. Physicians for Human Rights Israel released a 41-page report that describes how incarceration and detention have become an apparatus for revenge and retribution. Guards routinely deny Palestinians healthcare, daylight, time outside cells, mattresses, blankets, water, and electricity.

The words administrative detention, with their bureaucratic sheen, mask the truth: That the occupation disappears thousands of Palestinians into its dungeons without charge or trial, where they are torn from their families and communities and subject to mental and physical abuse.

But the spirit of Palestinians, detained or not, remains unbroken. No prison wall is capable of stifling the movement to resist occupation and psychological control. 

Remember the L.A. 8! Resist deportations!

Immigration and Naturalization Service, working with the FBI, stormed into the homes of seven Palestinian activists and one Kenyan activist on January 26, 1987. The activists were taken to solitary confinement at Terminal Island, a maximum security prison in California. The eight organizers — Amjad Obeid, Ayman Obeid, Khader Hamide, Julie Mungai, Bashar Amer, Nairn Sharif, Michel Shehadeh and Iyad Barakat — were charged with being affiliates of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Six were legally in the United States on student visas, while two, Hamide and Shehadeh, had been longtime lawful permanent residents of the country.

The government justified their arrest using the McCarran-Walter Act, which was originally written to deter Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors thought to be agents of the Soviet Union by barring the “economic, international and governmental doctrines of world communism.” 

The government has used that same law to justify the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil.

The justification is not quite the point — the underlying impetus was to strangle the broader movement. Soon after the organizers were seized, an INS document titled “Alien Terrorists and Undesirables: A Contingency Plan" was leaked, revealing that LA-8’s detainment intended to commence a project of mass deportation. The document outlined ways that the INS could deport legal permanent residents with origins in Libya, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, and Morocco. 

It was under the weight of this familiar repression that the LA-8 staged their defense. Over twenty years, the Eight fought anti-Communist provisions, anti-Terror provisions, a Supreme Court ruling, and the 2001 Patriot Act. The case finally reached its end in 2007, when a court Judge found that the American government “was in violation of the men’s constitutional, statutory, and regulatory rights.”

The protracted war against the LA-8 may hint toward the battles to come, but it should not deter us. The Trump administration is intent on the mass deportation of not only Palestinians and Arabs, but immigrants nationwide. Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, which gives the United States the authority to detain and remove immigrants when the country is in a state of “declared war,” threatens to expand the already rampant practice of unlawful abductions. We are prepared for this moment. Every further fascistic turn this government takes unites a movement intent on abolishing not only Zionism, but the U.S. empire in its entirety. No amount of repression can stop what has already begun; liberation is the only conclusion. 

Read with us

• You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works, Alaa Abd el-Fattah

• The Trinity of Fundamentals, Wisam Rafeedie 

• Like A Bag Trying to Empty: On the Palestinian Prisoner and Martyr Walid Daqqa, Kaleem Hawa

• If we abandon our political prisoners we abandon ourselves—Palestine shows us why, D. Musa Springer 

• The Hidden War Fueling New York’s Prison Guard Strike, Orisanmi Burton

• I am a political prisoner, not a hero, Francesca Nadin

• “Their hatred runs deep”: Freed Palestinian journalist Rula Hassanein on Israeli occupation, prison, Hana Muneer 

• Sovereignty, Dignity, Solidarity 

• “You're Not Defeated as Long as You're Resisting”: Palestinian Hunger Strikes between the Singular and the Collective: An Interview with Lena Meari

We leave you with the words of the freed prisoner and former PFLP leader Khalida Jarrar:

“In the end, we did more than fashion hope out of despair. We also evolved in our narrative, in the way we perceive ourselves, the prison and the prison guards. We defeated any lingering sense of inferiority and turned the walls of prison into an opportunity. Hope in prison is like a flower that grows out of a stone. For us Palestinians, education is our greatest weapon. With it, we will always be victorious.”