Undoing the prison inside and out: ‘The occupation is not fate’

“Yummaaaa yummmmaaa,” a released prisoner screamed while in the embrace of her mother. Another young boy was proudly hoisted onto his friends’ shoulders as he smiled to the cameras. They were two of 240 Palestinian prisoners who were exchanged between Hamas and Israel during a temporary “humanitarian pause.” The images, the screams, the smiles have seared themselves into our collective consciousness alongside that of other moments from the past two months: A man pulled out from beneath the rubble laying on a makeshift stretcher only to muster the force to hurl his upper body forward and raise the victory sign. Alongside images of bulldozers breaking through the Israel-Gaza border fence after a 17-year blockade. Alongside images of paragliders landing on areas in Palestine where Gazans most likely hadn’t stepped foot since the Nakba.

These images of pure euphoria almost beckon a breaking out into song as many Palestinian young men did during the Unity Intifada of 2021 (to the tune of a prisoners’ solidarity song):

نحن وياكم صامدين، يوم الفرحة ملقانا، عهدا منا نوفي الدين، ما ننساكم أسرانا

(We are steadfastly with you, and the day of joy will be the day of our meeting. We promise to make good on our debts. We will not forget you, our prisoners.)

Since prisons are so central to Palestinian life, with Israel arresting 40 percent of Palestinian men since 1967, many Palestinians see themselves as bound to prisoners through a duty — a duty to fight for their freedom, to echo Assata Shakur. The “prisoners’ movement,” as many Palestinians call it, is also what drives the street—producing prominent political leaders after organizing, learning and teaching in prisons. Prisoners are what unite Palestinians across colonial divisions to show up in blue solidarity “prisoners tents” from the West Bank to East Jerusalem to Gaza and the 1948 territories. As much as prisons are meant to divide and conquer, Palestinians have historically responded by uniting in solidarity. “Prisoners are the compass of our struggle,” the Palestinian Youth Movement wrote.

To keep filling its prisons, Israel relies on forced confessions, rigged military court conviction rates (almost 99 percent), and the policy of administrative detention. The latter automates the work of the Israeli intelligence officer, allowing them to arrest Palestinians without charge or trial under the premise of a confidential file. Israel’s arrest of thousands of Palestinians in October alone has led to overcrowding, resulting in at least an additional 2070 prisoners and 1034 detainees (amounting to a total of 7,000 prisoners). The role of such imprisonment is not only to criminalize resistance but to instill fear in those who dare to resist, as Yara Shoufani told the Real News Network: “[Prisons are a way to…] break Palestinian spirit and commitment to struggle and to instill fear in Palestinian people to deter opposition to Israeli genocide and occupation. And that is precisely why many of those in Zionist prisons are youth.” An average of 500 to 700 children are detained and prosecuted in military courts by Israeli forces every year, according to Defense for Children International – Palestine.

Behind prison bars

Conditions that are often invisibilized by the prison system were brought out into the public sphere during the “humanitarian pause.” Released Palestinian prisoners described unbearable conditions due to a particularly pernicious Israeli Prisons Service crackdown. IPS treatment includes underfeeding prisoners, providing them with unhygienic meals and polluted water, and limiting electricity. During the exchange, one boy, Mohammed Nazzal, was released with two bandaged and fractured arms and several broken fingers. This is but one of countless crackdowns in the history of Israeli prisons. Palestinian prisoners and detainees endure recurring crackdowns during their time in prison, sometimes simply for expressing solidarity with hunger strikers. Moreover, Israel typically begins its abuse of Palestinian detainees from the moment of arrest through beatings, illegal searches and destruction of property. On arrival at an interrogation or detention center (where an interrogation could last for hours), Israel continues its torture. The Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association has documented these techniques to include:

• Routine methods: Sleep deprivation by means of continuous and prolonged interrogation sessions; excessive use of handcuffs for extensive periods and their tightening to cut off circulation; beatings; slapping; kicking; verbal abuse and intentional humiliation; and the use of threats directed at the detainee or a family member, including threats of arrest of a family member, threats of sexual assault against the detainee or his/her family member, threats of house demolitions, and threats of killing.
• Special methods also referred to as “military interrogation techniques” used in “ticking bomb” cases and justified under the banner of “necessity defense”: The use of painful stress positions, where the detainee is bent backwards over the seat of a chair causing back pain, or forced to stand for prolonged periods against a wall with bent knees; pressure on different parts of the body; strong shaking of the detainee; strangulation and other means of suffocation.
• Inside the cells: Long periods of solitary confinement in small, windowless and, often, cold cells; sleep deprivation; deprivation of the right to basic hygiene products.”

During the interrogation period, Israel often totally cuts detainees off from the world, depriving them of the chance to see anyone but their interrogator and keeping their loved ones in the dark when it comes to their conditions. After October 7, Israel amended the 1996 arrest law that applies to people from Gaza, according to Addameer. What this means is that Israel will be able to interrogate Palestinians from Gaza for up to 90 days without allowing them access to a lawyer, “constituting another form of enforced disappearance” in the words of Addameer. In past weeks, Israel has cut off detainees, especially from Gaza, from the rest of the world, including from lawyers and the International Committee of the Red Cross. That said, an article published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has situated hundreds of arrestees from Gaza in “Sde Teiman” and “Anotot” military camps (rather than prisons) where “ a number of [these forcibly concealed] detainees have been killed inside these camps without confirmation yet regarding their numbers or identities.”

Emptied Stomachs

Just as the Nakba has been ongoing since 1948, so has Palestinian resistance to it, including by prisoners, in many forms, including hunger strikes. A prisoner’s hunger strike flips the rubric of dispossession on its head by choosing to deprive one’s body for the sake of dignity and freedom. Since 1967, prisoners’ hunger strikes have been crucial to securing important gains for prisoners, including mattresses, boilerplates, radios, televisions, reading materials, stationery, family photos, and more.

After Israel killed four hunger strikers throughout the 1970s-1980s while attempting to force-feed them, Yoel Adar, a legal advisor to the Occupation’s Public Security Ministry, was asked whether a hunger striker could harm the public. He responded: “If [the hunger striker] dies in prison, it causes riots — in prison, in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], in Palestinian territories. This has a definite implication on Israel.”^[1] Afterwards, perhaps to preserve some semblance of a liberal image and avoid prisoners’ deaths in Israeli custody, Israel ceded to many hunger strikers’ demands for freedom from detention, releasing prisoners it had medically neglected while they were in critical condition to die outside of their facilities.

This is partially why Khader Adnan’s death earlier this year, on the 87th day of his fifth hunger strike, reverberated so powerfully.

It was the first hunger strike death in decades. Israel’s liberal veneer at maintaining life behind bars was shattered, and Palestinians all over the world commemorated this martyrdom. As Amjad Iraqi wrote:

Across our social divides, we all see ourselves in Khader Adnan. We see the cruelty of our oppressors, the indifference of the international community, and the fragility of our bodies. But we also see in him our stubborn perseverance, our love for our families, and our longing for freedom.

At least six other detainees have died behind bars since October 7, including 56-year-old administrative detainee Omar Daraghmeh, who died on October 23 in Megiddo prison. As Layth Hanbali reported:

He was reported not to have any medical conditions prior to his arrest but reported feeling unwell two weeks after his incarceration. 25-year-old detainee Arafat Hamdan died on October 24 in Ofer prison. Two days before his death, he had been beaten, denied access to his diabetes medications, and left in the sun with a bag over his head for several hours.

Other prisoners reported that a third prisoner, Tha’er Abu Asab, was killed upon asking the jailor whether there was a humanitarian truce or not.

“Our martyrs give us life,” the Palestinian Youth Movement wrote. “We owe it to every martyr to fight, we have obligations, we have made commitments. When everything seems designed to generate resignation, to produce acquiescence, those commitments are life-giving and can see us through till the end.”

Manufacturing debility and disability

But confinement in Palestine isn’t limited to prisons. Whether it’s the litany of checkpoints and closure technologies that litter the West Bank or the 17-year siege of Gaza, there’s an understanding that “what happens inside is always reflected outside,” as academic and writer Ahmed Qattamish told me in 2016, while explaining the difference between what Palestinians call the “small [official] prisons” and the “large prison” demarcating the entire swath of Palestine. What happens to bodies in the large prison is inextricable from the landscapes they are embedded in.

In Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, when Abu Qais rests his chest against the ground, he hears the ground tremble beneath him: “It’s the sound of your own heart. You can hear it when you lay your chest close to the ground,” his neighbor tells him mockingly. But an alternative reading is somewhere between the literal and metaphorical: Abu Qais was hearing his heartbeat from the floor beneath him. For bodies are inseparable from the ground that holds the buildings housing them. Israel knows this deeply and does to the land and infrastructure what it does to the human body. Israel’s 16-year siege in Gaza has allowed it to inflict an all-encompassing violence on the Palestinian body — adding infrastructural destruction to the torture and medical neglect that happen within prison walls.

In past weeks, Israel’s aggression has been described as “urbicide” and “domicide,” terms that refer to the deliberate destruction of a city and its inhabitants' right to housing. In between past aggressions, Sari Hanafi referred to Israel’s siege of Gaza as “spacio-cide”: providing the “bare minimum for survival” through its minimal allocations of “calories, megawatts, water, telecommunication networks, [healthcare supplies] and spectrum and bandwidth allocations.”^[2] What Hanafi is describing is a mode of debility politics, which, according to Jasbir Puar,^[3] is a form of violence that differs from outright murder. It is a form of debilitating Palestinians by making their lives so difficult without killing them. Rather, through various social and political forces, it diminishes Palestinians’ life chances, reduces their capacities and constrains their lives. Beyond the mere absence or presence of a disability, debility functions as a broader category. Debility captures the impact of Israeli structural violence on the body, not just physically but also socially, politically, and economically, limiting Palestinians’ agency and autonomy.

Nutritional economics plays a central role in what we might call Israel’s debility politics, by creating other functional differences or losses in the body than disability — from malnourishment for instance.^[4] The urban geographer, Omar Jabary Salamanca, quoted an Israeli dietitian who described Israel’s mode of governing through a politics of debility: “The Palestinians will get a lot thinner but won’t die.”^[5] These slower processes are punctured by spectacular moments of military aggression during which Israel resorts to instantly disabling Palestinians through injury as well.

When Palestinians in Gaza marched non-violently for three years to the border in the Great March of Return, Israel amputated hundreds of marchers. (The Israeli military implements its shoot-to-disable policy during raids in the West Bank as well.) Moreover, in commenting on Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2023, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, who spent weeks at Gaza hospitals, mentioned that Israel’s violence led to the amputation of 700 to 900 children’s limbs.

During the current attack on Gaza, Israel used a new weapon to bomb the Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, namely: the US-made RX9-Hellfire, a weapon known as the “ninja.” The RX9 silently works to cut up limbs. “The [ninja’s] amputations seemed guillotine-like […]The edge of the injury is not burnt as in a typical bomb but clean and pinned, so textures seem as saw-cut,” noted Abu Sitta in an interview with Muna Omari. Clean cut. Deliberate.

Such is the course of Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Palestine at large (Gaza is merely a microcosm).^[6] They compound the existing debility and disability, deliberately disabling even more on a massive scale. They turn the barely livable into the humanly intolerable. Elsewhere in Palestine, when the military raided the village of Hizma, Jerusalem during the week of December 14, they left prosthetic legs behind, with the message: “Those who play with swords have their legs cut off.” Their message not only recalled the specter of Israeli military commanders who were instructed to break the bones of Palestinians during the first Intifada, but was also meant to wage psychological warfare in the same way that Israel makes more explicit in the “small prison” interrogation rooms and cells.

From Crip Time to the time of emptied stomachs in Palestine

When Khader Adnan went on strike against his imprisonment or detention four times prior to his last, he fast-forwarded the logic of the prison’s slow death and showed the brutality of the prison system for what it was. He seized his body back from the Occupation and carved it into the weapon its sheer existence can be — not just once or twice but five times over. Part of me wants to translate Khader and hunger strikers’ corporal and temporal resistance to the disability justice concept of “crip time.” Regardless of geography, all Palestinians who have lived through October 7 onward are arguably living through crip time — a concept from disability studies that reclaims the slang word for “crippled” for disabled people. Crip time dismantles the linearity of time and accommodates different paces of navigating the world and its expectations of efficiency and productivity. Crip time acknowledges that Palestinians have lived through levels of loss — personal bodily loss through disability and the loss of killed loved ones — you would “usually expect to see someone live in their seventies” a thousand times over.^[7] Crip time acknowledges that, with the debility and disability Israel is creating, moving through the loss of one’s own bodily capacities as well as the loss of mothers, fathers, children and entire family lines does not (cannot) have to bend in the same way that the clock typically does.^[8] In other words, crip time in Palestine can be a way of seizing back temporal logics from occupational management.

Yet, I’m also reminded, by Bekriah Mawasi’s questioning, of how the Palestinian struggle for liberation can be translated into English in ways that create unnecessary equivalences. Nakba and genocide. Palestinians and indigenous people. Etc. I wonder if the same applies to crip time. From what I’ve personally gathered from a few months of fieldwork research, I do know that Palestinians respect and salute the temporality of hunger strikers’ emptied stomachs, و تحيتنا عالية للأمعاء الخاوية, “Our salute is loud! To the emptied stomachs!” Palestinians often scream this refrain at the top of their lungs while protesting and marching for hunger strikers. In the context of the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip, the temporality of “emptied stomachs” captures Israel’s debility politics and Palestinian resistance to it all at once. It captures why, through decades of caloric occupation, Israel has pushed Palestinians today to the edge of starvation. And it also captures how Palestinian prisoners have historically resisted the Occupation’s countdown to their existence by reviving a revolutionary time of their own bodily accord — on strike.

Palestinians emptying their stomachs to be freed of administrative detention, in particular, have always unmasked Oslo liberalism for the genocidal intent that has always inhered within it. In their refusal to accept an imposed state of waiting — waiting on a farcical “two-state solution” that never comes, waiting for freedom, waiting on a detention period that can always be renewed, waiting to wait — they turned their stomachs into an alternative countdown for liberation. “[When I went on strike], I was sending a message that the occupation was not fate. Just like people assume the occupation is fate and that detention is fate, perhaps freedom can also be our fate,” Khader Adnan told me when we spoke in 2016.

Gaza has long been referred to as an open-air prison, since Israel’s 2007 blockade on the strip. If the prison is where Israel dehumanizes and tortures Palestinians, if the Prison is how Palestinians are separated in space and time, if the prison is where Palestinians’ health is often neglected, if the prison is where Palestinians are stripped of their autonomy over temporality, if Palestinians attempt to flip the script through hunger-strikes and other forms of resistance within these prisons, then there is much to be said not only about Gaza as Prison and the Prison as Gaza, but also about the rest of the Palestinian territories at large. If we understand October 7 onward as Palestinian captives in revolt, then we can understand Israel’s response as continuing to uphold the role of the prison — small and large — amid the ongoing Nakba that Oslo was always a deflection from.

With all of its intimidation, debilitation, and division, Israel continues to use the prison to attempt to quell the Palestinian body’s capacity for resistance and existence. Yet, Palestinians — those whom Israel has pushed to the brink of hunger in Gaza, those whose camps Israel has raided in Jenin, Tulkarm, and elsewhere, those whom Israel has threatened to disable and knee-cap in Jerusalem, those arrested in 1948 Palestine and the diaspora — continue to affirm their will to live. With all the life left in their bodies. It is our duty to witness, endure, and create our own reclaimed temporalities and countdowns until the time of liberation in whatever way we can with them.

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^[1] Shwaikh, M. M. (2018). “Dynamics of Prison Resistance: Hunger Strikes by Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israeli Prisons.” Jerusalem Quarterly 75 (Autumn 2018): 78-89, 87.

^[2] Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke University Press, 134.

^[3] Puar, The Right to Maim.

^[4] Livingston, Julie. (2005). Debility and the Moral Imagination in Bostwana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 7.

^[5] Puar,The Right to Maim , 134.

^[6] Also see Baconi, Tareq (2021). “Gaza and the one-state reality” (50):1.

^[7] Samuels, Ellen. “Six ways of looking at crip time” in Wong, Alice. (Eds) Disability visibility. (241-258: 222)

^[8] Samuels, “Crip Time,” 221.