Day 17: Palestinian Prisoners: The Compass of Our Struggle by Mariam Jaber

April 17th is the annual day where Palestinians from all over the world remember and honor the prisoners suffering in Israeli prisons.

The Palestinian prisoners’ cause is one that dates back decades. Since 1967, over one million Palestinians have experienced Israeli imprisonment. The Palestinian population within Palestine is only about seven million, so it’s staggering to realize that one in seven Palestinians has been arrested and imprisoned by this brutal occupying regime.

The Palestinian prisoners’ cause is one that is deeply personal to me. I’ve had family members and close family friends who have been arrested by the Israeli occupation forces. I grew up hearing about the unjust arrests, brutal interrogations, and even the hunger strikes that prisoners would carry out to demand their rights from the prison administrations.

Despite already having a connection and familiarity to the cause, it wasn’t until 2023 that the issue truly became real for me; just a few months before the war on Gaza began, my family and I traveled to the West Bank. There, I met one of my dad’s longtime friends, someone he’s known since he was a kid playing in the Qalandiya Refugee Camp.

I remember driving to their house, and my dad telling us that his friend, his wife, and two of their children had all been imprisoned. Their youngest son, who was only 22-years-old, had been released only six months earlier after spending a little over a year in prison. I was 19 at the time, and it was so shocking to meet someone so close to my age who had been through something so harrowing.

I knew, of course, that kids younger than me would often be arrested and imprisoned by Israel. One infamous story that comes to mind is that of Ahmad Manasra, a boy from Jerusalem who was arrested at 13-years-old and sentenced to 9 and a half years in Israeli prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

A video of his interrogation went viral: Israeli officers screamed at him, denied him medical care, and refused to allow his parents or a lawyer to be present.

They kept yelling at him, demanding he confess, while Ahmad, clearly distressed and terrified, repeated that he couldn’t remember. He was then forced to sign a confession written in Hebrew, a language he didn’t understand. His story is one that still haunts me today.

Ahmad was recently released just a few days ago, on April 10, after completing his near 10 year sentence in Nafha Prison, located in the Naqab desert of Palestine. He’s only 23 now, and he suffers from schizophrenia, a result of being held in solitary confinement for over two years. That kind of isolation is a direct violation of international law, which limits solitary confinement to no more than 15 days.

As Palestinians, we’re thrilled that Ahmad is finally free and reunited with his family. However, we also recognize that this is someone who has had his entire childhood stripped away. He is an adult now, and his future has also been taken away from him.

The world he knew at 13 is not the world he’s returning to. In many ways, he’s still stuck in that moment and in the mindset of a child who never got to grow up naturally.

Had he not been imprisoned, he might’ve finished his education and earned a bachelor’s degree by now. Instead, at 23, he’s left needing rehabilitation and medical care. How is he supposed to just pick up and move on with life?

Ahmad Manasra is just one story in the vast sea of Palestinian prisoners. The same can be said about prisoners who were freed after over 20 or 30 years in the Toufan Al-Ahrar (Flood Of The Free) 2025 Prisoner Exchange.

We must not wait for April 17 every year to remember our prisoners and commemorate them. Every day there are Palestinians being arrested and thrown into Israeli jails for nothing more than being seen as a threat to the Israeli entity.

Our prisoners are the compass of our movement as Palestinians. They guide our struggle and remind us what resistance looks like. We must continue to be their voices, because they are enduring a silent and ongoing battle — one that demands to be heard.