Ibtisam Mahdi
+972 Magazine / October 17, 2025
Though overjoyed by their release in the ceasefire, Palestinians — blinded, beaten, and starved in Israeli jails — struggled to absorb unimaginable loss.
On Monday afternoon, tens of thousands of Palestinians filled the courtyard of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. They were there to greet the buses carrying Palestinian detainees released as part of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. Some came to welcome loved ones, others simply to witness the historic moment. The courtyard overflowed with emotion: joy, tears, grief, and disbelief.
Of the nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees released as part of the first phase of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, over 1,700 are from the Gaza Strip. Yet many Palestinians felt the outcome fell short of expectations compared to previous exchanges, in which Hamas secured the release of far larger numbers of detainees for far fewer Israeli captives — most notably the 2011 “Shalit Deal,” under which 1,027 Palestinians were freed in exchange for a single Israeli soldier.
After being examined, the detainees left the hospital and walked through the ruined streets of the city, all still dressed in grey prison uniforms covering their emaciated frames. Their heads were shaven, their beards overgrown, their faces etched with the marks of weeks, months, and sometimes years of suffering.
“God has brought us back from the depths of the grave,” many of them repeated. The phrase captured both the torment of their imprisonment and the euphoria of their release. Yet for many, freedom came also with unimaginable loss.
Among them was 43-year-old Haitham Moein Salem, a resident of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip. He had been detained by the Israeli army just over a year earlier, during an Israeli incursion into Gaza City. On September 10, a month before his release, an Israeli airstrike hit his family’s tent in the supposedly “safe zone” of Al-Mawasi near Khan Younis, killing his wife and all three of his children — Iman, Layan, and Baraa. He had believed they would be waiting for him upon his return.
“No one informed me that my family had been targeted,” he told +972 Magazine after his release. “The Israeli army was known for delivering bad news from Gaza, especially when our families were attacked or killed.”
When he heard the news, Salem collapsed, and paramedics had to transport him in a wheelchair. For over a month, he had been preparing a small gift for his daughter Layan, carving it from leftover olive pits he had collected from the ground. He kept it in his pocket the entire time, saving it for what would have been her 9th birthday on October 18.
“I began counting the days [in prison], hoping I would get out in time to celebrate her birthday,” he recalled. “But today, just five days before it, I learned she had been martyred.”
Salem’s tragedy was not unique. Among the newly released detainees was 28-year-old Mohammad Assaliya, who had been arrested in late January 2024 during an Israeli ground invasion in Jabalia. Five months later, on May 31, an airstrike targeted his family home, killing his father, mother, and eight of his siblings. Only one sister survived.
“Freedom has a taste that cannot be described; our joy was beyond expression — but it shattered when I learned of my family’s martyrdom,” he told +972 Magazine. “A prison guard had told me about it, but I clung to the hope that it was untrue, that it was only psychological torture.”
Detained at the Ketziot prison in the Naqab (Negev) desert, Assaliya described the forms of abuse he endured over the course of his imprisonment: “We were deprived of food and water, denied sleep, and allowed to use the toilet only once a day. We were subjected to shabeh [a form of torture in which the prisoner is bound by each wrist and hung against a wall or door, arms spread wide, with their feet barely touching the floor]. We ate simple food while restrained.”
Assaliya said the mistreatment continued even in his final days in detention. “Two days before our release, they gathered us onto buses and kept us there until we were freed. We knew there was an agreement, but the soldiers told us we were being sent to another prison called ‘Hell.’ During that time, we weren’t allowed to eat or drink, and anyone who spoke to another detainee was beaten. It was a period of immense psychological pressure.”
‘All I want is just one eye back’
The state of Mahmoud Abu Foul, a 28-year-old from northern Gaza, stood out even among the sea of emaciated bodies that poured out of the buses at Nasser Hospital on Monday. His face and body were marked by exhaustion, illness, and abuse. Immediately upon his arrival, he was admitted to the emergency room, before being taken to Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah. Several hours later, he was released, but with no eyesight and severe inflammation in the stump of his leg, which was amputated in 2015 as a result of an injury from an Israeli airstrike while he was working in a blacksmith shop.
+972 spoke to Abu Foul four days later from a tent in Al-Zawayda in central Gaza, where he was sheltering with his family. “I was arrested by the occupation forces at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza on December 27, 2024,” he recounted. “I was subjected to horrific torture. They held a wooden tool and constantly struck me from the front and back, sometimes simultaneously, which caused me to lose my sight.”
Abu Foul believes he went blind about eight months ago. “Since around that time, I haven’t seen anything,” he said. “Even though I lost my sight, the interrogator continued to abuse me. My amputated leg was repeatedly struck, and I was hung from it more than once. During one of the interrogations, I was asked to sit directly on my amputated leg. This was extremely painful, and caused bleeding, which then led to inflammation. Of course, I didn’t receive any medication or treatment while I was in prison, which worsened my condition. I had to wash it only with water.”
What hurts Abu Foul most, he admitted, was the grief he felt after his family saw him in this condition. “It was difficult for my family to bear the shock of seeing me like this, blind. They were crying in front of me, thanking God that I had gotten out alive.”
Abu Foul now hopes to get a chance to receive treatment abroad. He was referred to an ophthalmologist who gave him some hope. “He told me that there is a chance I may get my sight back with certain treatment, but it isn’t available inside the Gaza Strip due to the collapse of the health system and the hospitals.
“The wound in my foot also needs intensive follow-up treatment so that it does not become infected and lead to a new amputation,” he added. “All I want is just one eye back so I can see my family.”
‘Beyond what anyone could imagine’
The experience of 30-year-old journalist Shadi Abu Sidwa reveals the depth of the psychological torture inflicted on Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. A resident of Gaza City, Abu Sidwa was detained on March 18, 2024, while displaced and seeking shelter at Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis.
“We were treated very badly, subjected to shabeh, beatings, and verbal, physical, and psychological humiliation,” he told +972 Magazine. “One of the interrogators told me that Israel had killed all the journalists in the Gaza Strip. He said soldiers had broken the eye [lens] of my camera when I was detained so that I could no longer document what was happening — and then he threatened to break my real eye too. He kept striking my eye until it bled for three weeks. I never received any medical treatment.”
Two weeks after his arrest, prison authorities informed Abu Sidwa that his wife and three children had been killed by the Israeli army in Gaza. Held in almost total isolation from the outside world and believing that he had no family to return to upon his release, Abu Sidwa dreamed only of seeing the sun again upon his release. “I left prison with an aching heart, imagining what my life would be like without my family — convinced they had all been martyred,” he recalled.
But this Monday, when Abu Sidwa was finally released, he was stunned to learn from his brother that his entire family was alive and safe.
At first, he refused to believe it, thinking that his brother was only trying to comfort him. But when he returned to his home in Gaza City, he found that not only was his home still standing, his entire family was waiting inside.
45-year-old Tareq Tabash, another released detainee, had spent 25 years behind bars after being arrested by the Israeli army in February 2001 at a checkpoint in Khan Younis. He was sentenced to life imprisonment plus 15 years for his alleged involvement in the killing of two Israeli soldiers.
Five years ago, his mother succumbed to illness. Tabash was not permitted to see her in her final moments or attend her funeral.
Despite harsh restrictions, he was determined to pursue an education while in prison. He earned a high school diploma, then a bachelor’s degree in history, and had begun working toward postgraduate studies — until, he said, Israel’s prison authorities imposed further limitations after the war began on October 7.
“Conditions in the prison worsened in ways that cannot be described since the war,” he told +972 Magazine after his release. “Torture and punishment became policy. The army would torment us by telling us everything happening in Gaza — the genocide, the large number of martyrs, the famine.
“Security inspections were one of the main forms of torture intended to degrade and abuse us,” Tabash continued. “We were forced to kneel, bow our heads, and place our hands on top of them. The guards would deliberately provoke us, using the slightest movement as an excuse to beat us with sticks and rifle butts.
“We were deprived of food, drink, and medicine, even those with chronic illnesses,” he added. “We were denied cleaning supplies and personal hygiene items, and forbidden from changing clothes or taking showers. The prisons were overcrowded. We were stripped of our belongings, and even the ability to speak to one another.”
Tabash called on the international community to take urgent action to address the situation inside Israeli prisons and to save those who remain detained. “The torture we endured — psychological, physical, and social — is beyond what anyone could imagine.”
‘We were deprived of everything’
Like Tabash and Abu Sidwa, 30-year-old Raja Daghmeh, a resident of the town of Abasan east of Khan Younis, endured severe psychological torture following his arrest on January 26, 2024, at a military checkpoint during the Israeli incursion into the city.
Daghmeh told +972 Magazine hat, shortly before his release, an interrogator at the Negev prison threatened that if he did not leave Gaza with his wife and young daughter and go into exile, he would be targeted and killed at the first opportunity.
“Throughout my detention, we were deprived of everything, even sunlight,” he said, echoing the accounts of other detainees. “We were subjected to constant torture: shabeh, broken bones, severe beatings, deprivation of food and water, and restrictions on using the toilet. We were allowed to shower once a month, without changing our clothes. In winter, we weren’t given blankets for warmth. We expected to die at any moment from the torture.”
Among the crowds gathered at Nasser Hospital was 39-year-old Mahmoud Mohsen, from the Khan Younis refugee camp, who had come to welcome the released prisoners. Speaking to +972 Magazine, he expressed frustration that Hamas delayed signing a ceasefire agreement, which he argued “would have spared many Gazan lives and protected the Strip from further destruction of buildings and infrastructure.”
Yet Mohsen affirmed that he believed the real accomplishment of the current deal was not the release of prisoners itself, but the halt to Israel’s attacks and the daily bloodshed.
Ismail al-Thawabtah, head of the Gaza government’s media office, shared a similar sentiment as he joined the crowds at the hospital. “The only achievement now is to halt the genocide,” he said. “All we were thinking about was stopping the mass killing and destruction of our cities, regardless of the details of the deal.”
The IDF Spokesperson did not respond directly to the allegations mentioned in the report but referred +972 Magazine to the Israel Prison Service, which stated that it “operates in accordance with the law and under the supervision of official oversight bodies. All inmates are held according to legal procedures, and their rights including access to medical care and adequate living conditions are upheld by professionally trained staff. We are not aware of the claims described, and to the best of our knowledge, no such incidents occurred under IPS responsibility.”
Ibtisam Mahdi is a freelance journalist from Gaza specializing in reporting about social issues, especially concerning women and children
