‘The hostages meant I came out’: Freed Palestinian prisoner welcomes Gaza deal

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

She joked, “In jail it was just hummus, hummus, hummus. Now, I can do something different.”

In the kitchen, family members and friends were hugging, her mother sitting at the table watching, happy that her only daughter was finally home as a result of the Gaza ceasefire agreement, after which Hamas exchanged hostages for Palestinian prisoners. Started releasing. Israeli prisons on Sunday.

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

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

He said, “I am a journalist. I have the right to express my views.”

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

In 2011, he was freed along with 1,000 other Palestinian prisoners as part of a deal to release Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held hostage in Gaza for more than five years.

Shortly after that agreement, he was immediately rearrested by Israeli forces.

She said that during her various arrests, she was severely beaten, threatened to be shot in the leg, and threatened with a cigarette on her back.

He was humiliated daily by guards in prison, he said.

“The worst thing was that I was not allowed to wear a headscarf,” she said.

“And when we first entered the prison I was stripped naked.”

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

This bespectacled young journalism graduate is a conservative Muslim.

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

He is the former mayor of al-Bireh village, just outside Ramallah. He has spent more than 19 years in Israeli prison.

I asked Bushra if she supports Hamas.

“I don’t want to be arrested again,” she said, declining to answer.

I also asked if she had any sympathy for the three Israeli hostages, young women like her, who were released on Sunday from Hamas captivity in Gaza after more than a year.

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

“The hostages meant I came out. As long as there are hostages, prisoners like me will be free.”

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

Some of those prisoners have been convicted of far more serious crimes, including multiple murders.

They are likely to be deported out of Israel and the Palestinian territories to countries such as Qatar and Türkiye.

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

Many people, like Bushra, were never charged and were held in Israeli prisons under “administrative detention”, a process strongly condemned by human rights groups.

Israel’s military argues that it often cannot release details of charges against people, even to detainees and their lawyers, for security reasons to avoid revealing the identities of informants.