Award-winning Palestinian author on Israeli prison, exile and homeland

The night Basim Khandakji’s novel won the 2024 “Arabic Booker Prize”, Israeli prison guards stormed his cell, assaulted him, bound his hands and feet, and threatened him.

The 42-year-old was then placed in Ofer Prison’s solitary confinement for 12 days.

It was retaliation, he believes, for embarrassing the Israeli prison system, managing to publish a book under the noses of guards, drawing attention to himself and the conditions he faced.

Now he is out of Israeli prison after serving 21 years of three life sentences.

“I still feel like I’m dreaming, and I’m terrified I might wake up and find myself back in a cell,” Khandakji said.

After his release, he remains unable to return home to his family in Nablus. Exiled from his homeland by Israel, he now waits in Egypt as his family fights to reach him.

‘We saw new horrors’

As happy as he is about escaping “the cemetery of the living” in Israeli prisons, Khandakji is still trying to process the horrors that he saw there and his sadness at leaving other prisoners behind.

He was convicted in 2004 of being part of a “military cell” and being involved in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, a crime he says he was forced to confess to.

“The lawyer told me I had to sign a confession … so that three young men could be spared life sentences. There was a kind of quid pro quo: You admit to a particular charge in exchange for getting some younger men out of life sentences, and that is what happened.”

The United Nations estimates that at least 75 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023, and organisations like B’Tselem and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights have revealed systematic abuse.

Khandakji spent months at a time in solitary confinement and was often moved between prisons, spending time in most of Israel’s 19 facilities that hold Palestinians – each as “hellish” as the last, he tells Al Jazeera.

“There are deliberate policies of starvation, abuse, psychological and physical torture, constant humiliation, and intentional medical neglect.”

Images of released Palestinian detainees have prompted outrage around the world. Appearing fit and healthy in photos of them before incarceration, on release, many had been reduced to emaciated, cadaverous shadows of their former selves.

Things changed, Khandakji says, after October 7, 2023 – the date of a Hamas-led attack during which 1,139 people died in Israel and some 250 were taken captive, in response to which Israel launched a two-year genocidal war on Gaza.

Khandakji says prisoners began to die with shocking regularity, with guards using “new horrific methods” – particularly on detainees rounded up by the hundreds from Gaza.

“Inmates saw guards hanging up the bodies of dead prisoners in cells and leaving them there, decaying,” he said.

“Another told me he saw more than 12 dead bodies packed into cells at al-Jalama detention centre.”

Khandakji says the harrowing memories of dead Palestinians and the brutal torture he witnessed and experienced will haunt him for his entire life.

“The main strategy authorities used to break prisoners was starvation,” he said. “There was also ‘cooling’, meaning denial of clothing, blankets, or any heating during the bitter winter.

“There was also constant beatings,” he added. “They use horrifying, savage methods – targeting the head, neck, and spine.”

Al Jazeera reached out to Israeli prison authorities for comment on Khandakji’s accusations, but received no reply.

Basem Khandakji hadn’t seen the books he published while he was in prison [Courtesy of the Khandakji family]

Communication with friends and family was banned, he added, and he was prevented from accessing news from the outside world – although he did receive word of his father’s death.

“I was deprived of my father while he was alive, and after his death I was denied the chance to bury him,” he said.

Nearly 9,000 Palestinians remain in Israeli jails, many taken in mass roundups, and more than 3,500 are held under “administrative detention”, which Israel created to justify imprisoning people indefinitely without charge or trial.

Smuggling out an award-winning novel

In prison, Khandakji says: “Writing gave me … a refuge, a hiding place through which I could escape the brutality of the jail and reclaim my freedom, even if only in my imagination.”

He had to go on hunger strike repeatedly to get notebooks and pens.

He wrote as much as he could, keeping his manuscripts hidden from the guards and staying out of their way until he could smuggle his writing out via his lawyer or any other visitor.

In 2023, his award-winning novel, A Mask, The Colour of the Sky, was published in Lebanon in Arabic and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, known as the Arabic Booker.

The book tells the story of Nur, a Palestinian archaeologist who finds an Israeli ID and takes on the identity of “Ur”, eventually joining an archaeological dig on an illegal Israeli settlement.

In it, Khandakji reflects on the uncovering of Palestine’s antiquity and the difference between the constrained life of Nur with his Palestinian ID and Ur, whose sky-blue ID allowed him to go anywhere.

Hearing of the shortlisting, an enraged ultranationalist Israeli national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, demanded harsher conditions for Khandakji, while others on the Israeli extreme right called for his murder.

His award triumph included a $50,000 prize and funding for an English translation, paving the way for a global readership.

When Israel launched its war on Gaza, conditions became worse in the prison, and guards confiscated Khandakji’s writing material and smashed his reading glasses.

He felt “completely powerless”, he says. “Being deprived of my pens and notebooks felt like being deprived of air.”

Now free, he aims to publish another novel, which he wrote in his head in his final year of captivity. It is based on one of his closest friends, writer Walid Daqqa, who died of cancer after allegedly deliberate medical neglect by prison authorities.

Aside from writing, Khandakji’s only solace in jail was the friendships he made “that even death cannot erase”.

“I live with sorrow and pain because I left behind so many friends in prison, still suffering,” he adds.

One of these friends, with whom he shared a cell, was Fatah politician Marwan Barghouthi, sentenced to five life sentences plus 40 years in 2004.

Barghouthi is often compared to South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, due to his decades behind bars as a political prisoner and the unifying popularity he has among Palestinians.

“Marwan Barghouthi is a great man,” he said. “If he were released, he could become a unifying national figure.”

The 66-year-old was beaten unconscious last month by Israeli jail authorities, and his son, Arab, told international media his father fears for his life as Israel continues to ignore international calls for his release.

His homeland lives within him

Khandakji was arrested in 2004, at the age of 21, while in his final year of a journalism and political science degree at An-Najah National University in his hometown of Nablus.

Raised in a family of socialists, Khandakji became active in the Palestinian People’s Party as a teenager. He is now an elected member of the party’s political bureau.

But during the second Intifada in the early 2000s, he decided to join the armed resistance in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Looking back, he says: “In the end, violence in all its forms is inhuman.

“As human beings, we should first try to solve our issues through peaceful and civilised means,” Khandakji said. “But when someone tries to erase you – to annihilate you – your struggle becomes one of existence.

“But if time could go back… I might look for other ways,” he adds, of seeking a different path, one that didn’t deprive him of his family for 21 years.

He was one of 250 high-profile detainees freed by Israel on October 13 as part of the United States-brokered Gaza ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel.

Israeli captives held by Hamas were released in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees, most of whom were “disappeared” by Israel from Gaza, according to the UN.

Khandakji described the night of his release as “terrifying”, adding that his body was shaking as he “knew the moment of freedom had finally come”.

When he passed the prison gates and his bus went south instead of towards Nablus, he knew his full freedom would be denied a little longer.

“Being exiled from your homeland is a burning, painful feeling,” he said. “My first joy, first sorrow, and first dreams were all in my city, Nablus.

“Palestinians, unlike others, do not live in their homeland – their homeland lives within them,” he said.

For now, Khandakji will continue writing and plans to pursue a PhD after achieving a master’s degree in Israeli studies while imprisoned.

His family is fighting desperately to reunite with him in Egypt, only to be repeatedly thwarted by Israel.

“I still hope that in the coming period, there will be some human justice that allows me to embrace my mother,” he says.

“Not as a freed prisoner – but simply as a child searching for the scent of his childhood in his mother’s arms.”