There is one name that stands out in the current negotiations between Hamas and Israel to achieve a ceasefire. It represents one of the keys to access the exchange of hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. This is Marwan Barghouti, 64, behind Israeli bars since 2002 under five life sentences. “I’m an optimist,” Fadwa Barghouti, his wife, simply responded with a smile and without making further assessments, this Tuesday in Ramallah, the administrative capital of the West Bank.
The leader of Hamas himself, Ismail Haniye, has called for the release of the best-known Palestinian prisoner, despite being a man from Fatah, a group that competes with the Islamist movement in the ins and outs of power in Palestine. For the Israeli authorities, Barghouti is a terrorist. For many Palestinians, a hero capable of bringing together the different factions, secular or religious, of a people shaken by war and the resignation of a government in crisis. His cellmates, now released and who have participated with his testimony in this report, go further: they directly idolize him. Not in vain, some consider him the Palestinian Nelson Mandela.
Israel’s Minister of National Security, the controversial ultranationalist Itamar Ben Gvir, took responsibility and boasted about the tightening of conditions, as he published on his X profile (formerly Twitter) on February 14. “Today arch-murderer Marwan Barghouti was transferred from Ofer prison to solitary confinement due to reports of planned riots.” That alleged call for violence, to which some Israeli media referred, did not come from his father, defends Arab Barghouti. “We don’t expect anything from Ben Gvir,” he concludes.
Precisely in Ofer prison, they forced him to handcuff him behind his back and injured his arm a few weeks ago, adds Arab. His father’s dance around Israeli prisons located in both Palestine and Israel has been constant during these almost three months of isolation, the son describes: “From Ofer to Ramleh, then Rimonim, back to Ramleh, then Maggido,” according to the latest information that the family has. Arab has not had direct contact with his father for 22 years and his wife, Fadwa, has not been allowed a visit for more than a year. The lawyer was able to spend some time with him at the end of January. Despite everything, the family remains optimistic while negotiations continue behind the scenes, but “the priority is to stop the genocide in Gaza and the release of all political prisoners,” not just his father, Arab clarifies.
Abdelqader Badawi, 29, was imprisoned by Israeli authorities as a teenager for resisting the occupation in the streets. He remained behind bars from 2012 to 2019 and between 2016 and 2018 he spent several periods confined alone in a cell with Barghouti. “He has had a great influence on me. He is the human being, the teacher, the friend… he welcomed me in prison with a smile. “He is a sea of generosity,” he draws in a portrait that he tries to idealize as much as possible while showing the photo of both taken in prison in 2017.
Badawi says that thanks to Barghouti, whom he calls “the doctor”, and his insistence that he should train, he obtained his school certificate and two degrees from Al Quds University (Jerusalem in Arabic). “Marwan Barghouti is without a doubt the solution. I believe that he can achieve a unity government with all factions and political tendencies,” he says from his office in Madar, the study center linked to Fatah where he works.
The war that broke out on October 7 has caused an earthquake at all levels. That day, Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2006, killed about 1,200 people in Israel in the worst attack in the country’s 75-year history. The Israeli army’s response has already killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza alone. Internally, Hamas’s popularity has continued to increase to the detriment of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), whose interim government since it resigned on February 26, is led by Fatah.
Future president?
But Barghouti’s figure continues to be the most valued in a possible presidential race, regardless of whether he faces the current president, Mahmud Abbas, or Ismail Haniye, according to the latest poll published in December by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research ( PSR, according to its acronym in English).
After almost two decades without elections, “there must be presidential elections and the Palestinians must choose who they want as leader,” comments Arab Barghouti. “The impact that Marwan Barghouti can have is that he can be a piece of unity, fight against corruption and against the occupation,” he adds, criticizing the internal division, the bad reputation that surrounds the Palestinian leaders and the Israeli yoke. . But he acknowledges that he does not know whether his father would jump into the race to lead Palestine at this time.
Barghouti, who tried to be a presidential candidate from his cell in the elections that were ultimately not held in 2021, was already on the list to be released when, in 2011, Israel exchanged more than a thousand prisoners for the soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been kidnapped in Gaza for five years. Finally, he was left out of the agreement, but the one who did leave prison was the Islamist Yahia Sinwar, today the head of Hamas in Gaza and the man most wanted by Israel as the mastermind of the October 7 attack.
The former Abdelqader Badawi laughs and remains silent when asked about the current president, Mahmud Abbas, increasingly in question. “I’m not going to answer,” he says. “We need leadership that will take us along the path of rebuilding the ANP” because, “unfortunately, politics has not been strong in the last two decades,” he comments while highlighting that the circumstances today are different from those that took place. Barghouti was imprisoned in 2002 in the middle of the second Intifada, even accused of some murders. Today, he adds, the focus must be on ending the “bloodbath in Gaza.”
“If it depends only on Israel, Barghouti will not leave [de prisión]”But we have to look at the negotiations and how Hamas plays its cards,” says Abdelfatah Doleh, who was imprisoned between 2006 and 2011, a period in which he also shared a cell with him. “If Hamas thinks about the good of all Palestinians, it needs Barghouti,” understands Doleh, spokesman for one of the sections of Fatah and another of those who have the most famous prisoner on a pedestal.
Hamas “needs Barghouti because there is a lot of pressure against the Islamists at the international level” after October 7 and “knows that after the war it will be very difficult to manage and lead Gaza again and rebuild it, that is why Barghouti can be It helps,” estimates Sari Orabi, a political analyst and writer who, because he belonged to Hamas, spent five years in Israeli prisons and three in those of the ANP. Already placed in a “neutral” zone and without direct contact with the leadership of the Islamist movement to “avoid returning to prison,” Orabi believes that it was the upper echelons of Fatah that blocked the way for Barghouti’s release in 2011 and those that tried to of cornering those who supported him in 2021 with the formation that he planned to present.
Luis de Vega
“Barghouti is the solution for many, but it is not for me.” Contrary to the rest of those consulted is Nashaat Aqtash, a professor at Birzeit University and a collaborator in the Hamas electoral campaign in the last elections, in 2006. He sees the prisoner with a lot of support among the new batch of Fatah members, but not among the veteran leaders. He believes that, despite the war, international pressure against the Islamists and the polls, neither Abbas nor Barghouti would win a presidential election against a Hamas candidate.
Surrounded in one of the Fatah headquarters by posters with the image of the late President Yasser Arafat, veteran militant Haifaa Qudsia, 68, fears that, once freed, Israel will want to banish Barghouti abroad but believes that, even so, will maintain his leadership role. “The only way out for Hamas in the current circumstances is Marwan Barghouti,” she defends. Others, like Abdelqader Badawi, cling to sentences learned like a mantra behind bars from their teacher and former cellmate: “The last day of occupation will be the first day of peace.”
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