"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."
"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."
Basim Khandakji spent 21 years in Israeli prisons, serving three life sentences and enduring solitary confinement, frequent transfers, and physical abuse. Guards assaulted and bound him the night his novel won the 2024 Arabic Booker Prize and placed him in solitary for 12 days, which he attributes to embarrassing the prison system by publishing. He says he was forced to sign a confession in 2004 to spare younger men life sentences. He remains exiled from his family in Nablus and is waiting in Egypt while his family seeks reunion. Human rights groups report deaths and systematic abuse in Israeli prisons.
Read at www.aljazeera.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]