IMPOSSIBLE to bottle this sensibility. All of Gaza is a ruin. Millions of Palestinians have braved the winter in makeshift tents or in ruined buildings, their children freezing (a few frozen to death) and their hunger escalating. The smell of Israeli vengeance is everywhere. The sound of the tanks and the even more terrifying silence of the bombs shatters the nerves of even the most hardened fighter. Yet, during that, the armed units of the Palestinian resistance continue to fire their depleted ammunition at the Israeli troops, while children run amidst the toxic wreckage with Palestinian flags aloft.

There is a ceasefire now. But this is the rhythm of Palestinian history since at least 1948: occupation, war, ceasefire, and underneath everything the constant occupation and the threat of war, and yet, the defiance and the smiles. In the lexicon of the Palestinian resistance, the word sumud, used first in the 1960s by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, is everything: it means to defy, to be steadfast, to hold onto one’s land despite the Israeli occupation. It is to take out the key to one’s pre-1948 Palestinian home and hold it afloat.

When Khalida Jarrar emerged into the crowd of supporters after months in Israel’s cruel dungeons, she said, “I’m coming from solitary confinement. I still don’t believe it. I’m a little bit tired.” Jarrar, one of the leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), has been in and out of Israel’s prisons for almost her entire adult life. Her first detention was in March 1989 when she participated in a march for International Women’s Day. I have followed her journey in and out of prison, cataloguing her distress as her captors preventing her from being at the funeral of her father (2015), mother (2018), and her daughter Suha (2021). Jarrar is one of thousands of Palestinians who are held in Israeli prisons under “administrative detention,” a false term that justifies indefinite imprisonment with no charge.

Each time Jarrar went to prison, the behaviour of her Israeli captors was harsher and harsher yet. This time, arrested during the genocide in December 2023, she was put into a cell with poor ventilation and could not breathe with ease. Her husband, Ghassane Jarrar, read out a statement from her from August 2024: “I die every day. The cell looks like a tiny, airtight box. The cell is equipped with a toilet and a small window above it, which was closed a day after I was moved to it. They did not leave me any space to breathe. Even the so-called porthole in the cell door was closed. I spend most of my time sitting next to a tiny opening that allows me to breathe. I wait for the hours to pass while I suffocate in my cell in hopes of finding oxygen molecules to breathe and survive.”

Now, Jarrar leaves prison along with ninety other Palestinian prisoners who were exchanged for three Israeli prisoners in the first part of the ceasefire deal. The stories of the prisoners are astounding and enraging. The Israelis arrested one young Palestinian woman (Shatha Jarabaa) for writing on social media about the “brutality” of the genocide, while another young man (Zakaria Zubeidi) of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin was held under suspicion of being a terrorist.

Two other women from the PFLP, Abla Sa’adat and Maysar Faqih, had been arrested by the Israelis without charge and held under administrative detention as part of the general Israeli strategy of preventing the Palestinian groups from political activity. The PFLP’s leader, Ahmad Sa’adat has been in prison for decades and will likely not be released until the occupation ends. It has been on the Israeli agenda for decades to weaken the Palestinian Left – particularly the PFLP – and thereby to strengthen the Islamist forces, allowing them to falsely make the case that this is a war against Islam rather than a brutal campaign to extinguish the Palestinian nation.

IT IS THE OCCUPATION

In August 2014, Israeli soldiers surrounded the home of Khalida and Ghassane Jarrar. They had come to inform Khalida Jarrar that she was banned from her home in Ramallah and had to restrict herself to the town of Jericho. “It is the occupation that must leave our homeland,” she said to the soldiers. Then, she and her comrades set up a tent outside the Palestinian Legislative Council office and lived there. The Israelis had to back off. There was too much international pressure on them.

A people under occupation are a people imprisoned. Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank – the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as the United Nations calls it – have no freedom of movement. They are encaged. Those who want to break the cage are further imprisoned in the terrible conditions of Israeli jails. Little wonder then that Jarrar was from 1993 to 2005 the director of Addameer, an NGO to provide support for prisoners. Between being in and out of Israeli jails, she has been working on a research project for Birzeit University’s Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights on “The Class and Gender Dimensions of the Palestinian Prisoners Movement and their Implications for the National Liberation Project.”

It is likely that a few days from now, Jarrar will come out of her house, give a speech, and then return to work on her project. Made of such steel and love, Jarrar is unrelenting. As are the Palestinians who are slowly moving back toward their destroyed homes in Gaza, looking for the stray photographs, the few belongings, the roots that have not been cut.