Freed Palestinian prisoner welcomes Gaza deal

On her first day of freedom, Bushra al-Tawil was enjoying her morning coffee and waiting for lunch when we arrived at the family home in Ramallah.

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

In the kitchen, there were hugs from family and friends, her mother sitting at the table watching, happy that her only daughter was about to come home because of the Gaza ceasefire agreement that led Hamas to begin releasing prisoners 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 arrested without charge, most recently since March 2024, except for one time when he was tried for a speech he gave in a mosque.

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

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

In 2011, he was released along with 1,000 other Palestinian prisoners as part of a deal to free Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who had been held captive in Gaza for more than five years.

Soon after, he was quickly arrested again by the Israeli army.

He said that while he was being arrested in various ways, he was severely beaten, threatened to shoot his leg and had a cigarette pulled from his back.

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

“The worst thing was that they forbade me to wear a headscarf,” he said.

“And as soon as we entered the prison, they stripped me naked.”

Israeli prison officials say all prisoners are treated according to the law.

The handsome young journalism graduate is a staunch Muslim.

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

He is the 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 supports Hamas.

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

I also asked if she felt sorry for the three Israeli captives, girls like her, who were freed from Hamas captivity in Gaza on Sunday after more than a year.

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

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

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

Some of these prisoners were found guilty of serious crimes, including multiple murders.

They should be deported from Israel and the Palestinian territories to countries like Qatar and Turkey.

But all the Palestinians released on Sunday, among them several children, were found guilty of minor crimes.

Many, like Bushra, have never been charged and are held in Israeli prisons under so-called “detainer detention”, a policy widely criticized by human rights groups.

The Israeli military says it is often unable to release details of criminal cases, even to detainees and their lawyers, for security reasons, to avoid revealing the identity of their informants.