by Rima Najjar
In Cairo, my colleague Jaldia Abu Bakra and I sat with men who had walked out of prison but not into freedom, their eyes carrying the relief of release alongside the ache of uncertainty.
We saw their unmoored state — precious freedom stretching like empty desert horizons, pathless. We saw their dignity shining through despair, our hearts taut between admiration and sorrow.
Yet we witnessed something luminous: the knowledge that they had not been erased — that Israeli prisons failed to hollow them out, leaving them fully human, present, and capable of love despite everything. Their spirits remained unbroken by years of confinement.
Decades inside one of the most brutal carceral regimes on earth had reoriented their nervous systems and their sense of time. They had grown more open to vulnerability and more resilient against erasure. Caring passionately has taught them to accept grief as part of the contract — as if the world now has a moral compass running through their chests, guiding their paths and echoing a people’s unyielding struggle.
For Jaldia and me, those days in Cairo revealed a collision of incompatible truths: hope that hurts, liberation weighted by loss, joy that aches, love that cannot protect, anger that cannot rest. What we witnessed was the afterlife of captivity — a system built to outlive the prison itself.
Caption: Jaldia Abu Bakra and I with some of the liberated prisoners: Mohammad Nayef Abu Rabia from Tulkarm / Raed Abdel-Jalil from Nablus / Rami Nour from Nablus / Mansour Shreim from Tulkarm / Bilal Abbas from Salfit / Abdel-Majid Hashem from Ramallah / Ahmed Salim from Salfit.
In the October 2025 phase of the Gaza ceasefire, Israel released nearly 2,000 Palestinians — including 1,700 seized from Gaza and held without charge, plus 250with life or long sentences — in exchange for Hamas’s 20 remaining living hostages and the gradual return of some deceased captives’ remains.
Israel brands these men as “security threats” or “terrorists” to criminalize their struggle and legitimize lifelong sentences or indefinite detention. In reality, they are freedom fighters imprisoned for legitimate resistance against decades of violent occupation, rooted in the Nakba — the 1948 catastrophe that saw the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians, the destruction of hundreds of villages, and the dispossession of land to establish Israel, a process that is ongoing through continued settlement expansion, evictions, and annexation. Resistance includes organizing operations against Israeli military targets and Jewish settlers advancing colonization in the West Bank and Jerusalem — a city under illegal annexation, family evictions, and restricted access to al-Aqsa, all eroding centuries of Palestinian memory.
Many endured years or decades in administrative detention — imprisonment without charge, trial, or evidence, endlessly renewed via “secret” files hidden from detainees and lawyers. This backbone of Israel’s colonial rule suppresses resistance, fractures families, and erodes communities’ social fabric.
Of the 250 long-term freed prisoners, 154 (many “high-profile”) were barred from returning home and deported to Egypt. As of January 2026, they’re in limbo, with third-country relocations stalled — only fewer than two dozen reaching Turkey or Malaysia. The rest face provisional statuses amid ongoing negotiations, confined to isolated facilities like the one in Ain Sokhna with restricted movement, no right to work, limited access to visitors, and constant security oversight that echoes their past captivity.
This extended suspension inflicts profound psychological strain — prolonged uncertainty eroding the fragile relief of release, intensifying feelings of displacement and abandonment — while practically perpetuating family separation: loved ones in Palestine risk permanent loss of reentry if they attempt to visit, leaving men who endured decades apart now facing indefinite exile from wives, children, and communities.
Their resilience proves that prison failed to defeat them. From pre-trip accounts — and now post-release reflections — of Mahmoud al-Arda, Ahmad al-Dahidi, Muhammad Imran, and others — each endured decades of confinement, intensified torture after October 7, and the final indignity of exile. Al-Arda, the architect of the legendary Gilboa escape, spoke from Cairo of how the idea of freedom lived in him from his first day imprisoned over three decades ago, viewing every act of resistance — including the spoon-dug tunnel — as a refusal to let the occupation define him. In their words, no hollow echo — just the steady rhythm of men who taught prison what humanity looks like: unbreakable defiance, enduring love for homeland, and a quiet insistence that even exile cannot erase the spirit they carried out with them, now into uncertain futures.
Yet the world still refuses to make room for these men. This is the structural crueltyJaldia and I felt to our core: a calculated indifference embedded in policies and borders. These men are too potent a symbol to ignore, too threatening to accept. So the system suspends their lives in perpetual exile, preserving a fragile regional order that prioritizes authoritarian stability and colonial complicity over justice, return, and dignity.
These men command moral authority. They attract public sympathy. They energize political networks. For many regimes — especially authoritarian ones — hosting them in any visible or empowered way raises alarms. The default policy is to contain them discreetly, withhold integration, suppress politicization — mirroring how dissidents are managed worldwide. Even within Israel, some officials and analysts now question the long‑term utility of deportation, warning that it risks deepening resentment and hardening hostility. They point to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order) — a measure renewed annually since 2003 whose “temporary” form masks a permanent architecture designed to keep Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza out of Israel and occupied East Jerusalem. By blocking Palestinian spouses from acquiring residency or citizenship, and by preventing thousands from returning to their own homes or reuniting with their families inside Israel and East Jerusalem, the law openly functions as a demographic gatekeeping tool. Its temporariness is the mechanism of its permanence: a rolling exception that entrenches exclusion as policy.
Most Arab governments — particularly Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Gulf states — operate under an unspoken but rigid principle: do not absorb Palestinians in ways that normalize permanent exile.
Jordan already hosts millions of Palestinians, many of whom have lived for generations without citizenship or full civil rights, their presence managed through a framework that treats permanence as something that must never be acknowledged. Lebanon’s sectarian system, strained and brittle, confines Palestinians to a legal and economic limbo that has lasted decades, insisting on their temporariness even as it becomes the defining condition of their lives. Across the Gulf, states avoid absorbing political populations altogether, offering Palestinians work but never belonging, mobility but never rootedness.
Taken together, these regimes mirror the situation of the deported prisoners in Egypt: a supposedly provisional arrangement that denies them legal status, freedom of movement, and any path to return. In each case, “temporary” becomes the mechanism through which permanence is enforced — a regional order that keeps Palestinians suspended between displacement and exclusion, never allowed to settle, return, or belong.
Western states hide behind “security screening,” quotas, and diplomatic sensitivities, deeming these men legally complex and politically radioactive. What appears as procedural delay is, in human terms, abandonment by paperwork.
As the men themselves say, their “real freedom remains elusive.” They lack legal status, travel documents, work rights, and even freedom to leave confinement.
Most were arrested in their early twenties. They are now in their forties and fifties, carrying lives interrupted at the moment they began. Their families cannot safely travel to Egypt, because even attempting to do so risks permanent denial of reentry to Palestine — a mother embracing her son after decades might never return home, to her other children, or her land.
One man told us his son is now imprisoned — arrested for statements supporting Gaza after his father spoke publicly in Cairo. The cycle closes on itself: the son’s child is the same age the son was when his own father was taken. Prison reproduces itself across generations, ensnaring families in endless rupture. Since 1967, an estimated one million Palestinians — roughly one in five — have passed through Israel’s carceral system, a staggering toll that normalizes detention as a rite of passageand fractures the social fabric of an entire people.
Another man shared a faded photograph of his son, conceived through sperm smuggled from prison. The photo carried quiet defiance: life persisting against systems designed to extinguish it.
None plan to remarry, revering wives who waited decades. Their religious and cultural commitments — structures of dignity — survived all else that had been stripped away.
Among the unmarried, another form of resistance has emerged. Several have chosen to marry young women from Gaza who have lost entire families. They refuse to bind West Bank women to siege-bound, exiled lives. For these men, marriage has become collective repair, weaving new kinship amid widespread loss.
Egypt now hosts the afterlife of a carceral system extended across borders. And even this fragile arrangement has been reshaped by Western media intervention.
The Daily Mail’s October 25, 2025 exposé — headlined “Hotel Hamas” — portrayed them as “fanatics” and “terrorists” reveling in luxury at the Renaissance Cairo Mirage City, a Marriott resort with fitness centers and salons, doors from vacationers. It stripped away the reality of enforced exile and ignored decades in a colonial carceral system, criminalizing Palestinian existence. Fallout came immediately: Egyptian authorities, citing “journalistic subterfuge” and Western optics, relocated them to an isolated facility in Ain Sokhna, 90 minutes from Cairo.
The irony cuts deep: what began as a sensational framing of “luxury” to criminalize their very presence only accelerated their descent into stricter confinement, extending the prison’s logic across borders — from cells to hotel to remote isolation — proving once again that freedom, for these men, remains conditional on erasure rather than release.
Heightened security — stricter monitoring, no city excursions, armed oversight — turned hospitality into confinement. Their movement, location, and treatment were recalibrated by media-fueled fear and by the political order that governs the region: an order that protects state power, manages dissent, and treats Palestinian presence as a threat to be contained. We felt it firsthand — detained for hours by Egyptian security while visiting the original hotel, our identities scrutinized under that tabloid’s shadow.
Their treatment follows the global repertoire of authoritarian containment, where dissident exiles are monitored, restricted, and politically neutralized. Across China, Russia, Turkey, and Egypt, regimes pursue critics abroad through surveillance, coercion, threats to families, and pressure on host states wary of diplomatic retaliation. Western democracies join in: France held Georges Abdallah for over four decades despite eligibility for release, viewing him as a security liability tied to Lebanese-Palestinian history. The U.S., U.K., and Europe impose bans, restrictive visas, and detentions on unsettling activists.
Within this global pattern, the Palestinian case carries a different weight. It emerges from a colonial architecture that transforms exile into a tool of dispossession, severing people from land, community, and political belonging. The goal is not only to neutralize dissent but to dissolve the conditions of return, turning displacement into a permanent horizon.
What struck us most, amid the control machinery, was a political imagination pushed from public life — one that once animated the region, making liberation a shared project with Palestine as its moral center for dignity.
Caption: Yasser Arafat at the tomb of Gamal Abdel Nasser — a gesture of continuity between Palestine’s struggle and the Arab world’s last great project of collective liberation.
Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt treated Gaza as part of that horizon. The state opened its universities to Palestinians, integrated them into civic and political life, and articulated a regional future grounded in anti-colonial sovereignty, Arab unity, and social justice. Palestine was not framed as a humanitarian crisis to be managed but as a living strugglethat bound Arab destinies together. In that era, Palestinians in Egypt were students, teachers, organizers, and political actors whose presence affirmed a collective projectrather than an exception carved out of pity or expedience. Many from Gaza and the diaspora enrolled in Egyptian universities on equal or discounted terms with nationals — gaining qualifications that propelled them into professional roles across the Arab world — while others contributed to pan-Arab organizing, including early formations of groups that fed into the PLO’s founding in Cairo in 1964 under Nasser’s auspices. Figures like Yasser Arafat himself studied civil engineering at what became Cairo University in the 1950s, emerging as a student leader and organizer in Palestinian unions before founding Fatah.
The men we met in Cairo carried traces of that world. Their discipline, their loyalty to families sustained across decades of rupture, and their refusal to relinquish political commitment echoed the dignity that shaped Nasser’s generation. They embodied a consciousness from when the region imagined freedom — one surviving captivity, exile, and institutional dismantling.
Cairo today moves through different coordinates. Our tour guide — a man with decades of experience — began his narrative by praising the monarchy that preceded the 1952 revolution. When I asked him to take us to the Gamal Abdel Nasser Museum, he had never heard of it and searched for the address on his phone. The museum exists, open and state-maintained, yet it sits outside the city’s living memory. Nasser’s legacy endures as curated property rather than a political compass, preserved as artifact rather than lived horizon.
Caption: Gamal Abdel Nasser quotes: “Our mission is to support every nation struggling for its freedom.” “Raise your head brother, the age of colonialism is over.” “My brothers, the whole Arab nation and army is indeed now one.”
The city now speaks through antiquity, megaprojects, and the vocabulary of security and stability — a language that manages populations rather than mobilizing them, and that treats political imagination as a liability. The earlier vision has been sealed away, replaced by a regional order that prizes quiet over justice and stability over solidarity.
And still, listening to the liberated Palestinian men describe their lives, we were encountering the human continuation of that buried order. Its institutions have vanished, but its ethos survives in the people it shaped. Their commitments — to family, struggle, and a larger future — summon it back, revealing an imagination forced underground, carried in unerasable bodies.
Reclaiming that imagination means more than remembering Nasser or invoking a lost era. It means mobilizing for their return — and for the return of all Palestinian exiles — treating the buried as a living justice demand, a vision to reinhabit, rebuild, and activate. This begins with concrete steps: amplifying their voices through interviews, testimonies, and solidarity networks that reach global audiences; pressing governments — Egyptian, Arab, and Western — to honor promises of relocation while rejecting indefinite limbo; supporting advocacy campaigns that demand family reunification, legal status, and the right to return home; and building coalitions that challenge the policies of containment through diplomacy, public pressure, and persistent calls for accountability — especially as over 11,000 Palestinians remain detained in Israeli prisons, with new arrests and the cycle of incarceration continuing unabated even after the October 2025 releases. In their unbroken spirits lies not just endurance, but a summons to action: the buried order awaits those willing to unearth it, one determined step at a time.
Note: First published in Medium