Prisons turned battlefields: The memoir of a Palestinian who found hope behind bars

According to these former detainees, the prisons have effectively become another front in Israel’s war on Gaza.

As reported by The Guardian, Nasser Abu Srour — a prominent Palestinian writer who was released last month after more than 32 years in Israeli prisons — said that the use of torture during the last two years of his imprisonment had increased dramatically, as Israel treated its prisons as an extension of the Gaza battlefield.

Abu Srour, 56, whose prison memoirs have been translated into seven languages and who is expected to win a major international literary prize this month, was among more than 150 Palestinians sentenced to life imprisonment who were freed as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal. They were immediately deported to Egypt, where most remain in a state of uncertainty.

He reported a sharp increase in beatings and deprivation of food and heat after the Gaza war began in October 2023.

“The guards’ uniforms and insignia changed,” he said. “They behaved as if they were at war, treating the prison as another battlefield. They began beating, torturing, and even killing prisoners as though they were fighting on the front lines.”

A UN commission documented 75 deaths of Palestinians in Israeli custody between October 7, 2023, and August 31, 2025.

The Israeli Prison Service has repeatedly denied the use of torture in its facilities.

Now living in Egypt, Abu Srour described the disorienting shock of moving directly from the conditions of Israeli imprisonment to a hotel in Cairo.

He had been arrested during the First Intifada (1987–1993) and in 1993 was sentenced to life without parole. During decades marked by long stretches of solitary confinement, he earned a bachelor’s and later a master’s degree in political science, and began writing poetry and essays that were smuggled out of prison.

His prison memoir, The Story of a Wall: Reflections on Hope and Freedom, was largely dictated over two years of phone calls with a relative. The book has been translated into seven languages and is a finalist for the annual Arab Literature Prize awarded by the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.

Abu Srour said repeated appeals for his release had gone unanswered over the decades. So, when Israeli officials entered the prison on October 10 with a list of prisoners to be freed, he paid little attention.

“They were calling out cell numbers,” he recalled. “I was sitting on my bed in cell number six, convinced I wasn’t on the list. For years, there were times I should have been, but it never happened. It was too painful to hope. It was a defense mechanism — I told myself it had nothing to do with me. Then they came to my cell and said, ‘Get ready.’ Finally, God’s mercy reached me. My friends hugged and kissed me. I was in disbelief.”

He added that after the Gaza war began, the treatment of long-term Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails became significantly worse: “Everywhere there were no cameras became a place of brutality. They tied our hands behind our backs, threw us to the ground, and kicked us.”

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has boasted that the prisons under his control are no longer “summer camps.” Abu Srour said that under Ben-Gvir’s policies, all means of reading and writing were eliminated.

“In prison, only biological life existed,” he said. “Everyone was just trying to survive in their own way. We were constantly hungry; our daily food rations were kept at bare survival levels. I lost 12 kilograms.”

He recounted that in the 24 hours before the prisoners’ release under the ceasefire, they were severely beaten. During the 48-hour journey that followed, they were not allowed to open the curtains of the buses carrying them through the occupied territories and along Gaza’s southern edge toward the Rafah crossing into Egypt.

“It was only upon entering Egypt that I saw the sky outside prison for the first time,” he said.

Abu Srour described being overwhelmed when he saw his four sisters and brother for the first time in decades: “It was shocking — another source of stress. We had been separated for 33 years. It felt cruel because we had been deprived of this for so long.”

He now faces the challenge of rebuilding his life in freedom and exile.