Hassan Salameh was born in Khan Younis in 1971, four years into the Israeli occupation of Gaza. During the First Intifada, he rose to be a central figure in the Al-Qassam Brigades, before eventually being arrested in 1996. His 2022 memoir, Five Thousand Days in the World of Barzakh, provides a stunning first-hand account of the barbarous conditions he and other Palestinian prisoners are still subject to in Israeli dungeons. In particular, he recounts his long years in solitary confinement and the love that blossomed despite this isolation between him and his wife Ghufran Zamel.
The arrival of his marriage certificate at the prison in 2010 stirred indignation from the prison director who scoffed: “When did you leave your cell to be able to claim that you have been married?” Then, with cold certainty, he told Salameh: “You will live here, and will die here.” For Ghufran this outrage was an affirmation that their union had fulfilled its purpose.
Zionist prisons seek to break the bonds between Palestinians and the outside world — their families, their nation, and their struggle — and solitary confinement is the highest attempt to break the morale and will of the prisoner. Salameh says: “If they could deprive us of air, they would have done so.” He writes in his letters that in solitary confinement, Ghufran and his mother — who was martyred in 2024 during Israel’s genocide in Gaza — became the air that he breathed.
Salameh was sentenced to 48 life terms, and denied release by the Occupation as part of the 2011 prisoner exchange deal. After decades of torture and isolation in Israeli prison, where he still remains, he asks God for relief only so that he may return “to the field of battle as a mujahid.” We offer a select translation of Salameh’s memoir here — in English for the first time — in the hope that his unerring resolve under grim odds will guide those of us lucky enough to bear witness to his story.
The First Phase of Isolation (1997)
My experience in isolation, within these sections fashioned for a slow death, where one lives, really, in limbo, has lasted as long as my detention itself. On May 17, 2011, it will be fifteen years since I was first imprisoned.
Arrested on May 17, 1996, I remained in their “interrogation” cells until December of that same year. They then moved me out to the prison wing for less than a month before I returned again for interrogation. I came out in the second month of 1997.
During this period, I was held in Ashkelon, in the sections cordoned off for what they called “security prisoners.” It was a time of repeated court appearances, of real torture. I was constantly abused by the Nahshon Unit — the military battalion responsible for transporting prisoners between the prison, the courts, and the hospital. I was usually taken to court alone — at Erez, at the Beit El Military Court in Ramallah, and at the Al-Majnoona court in Hebron — and thus left regularly exposed to abuse. Rarely, if ever, did I return from a hearing without being beaten. Though the other prisoners tried to do something to protect me, it was futile; the cycle persisted.
I cannot speak about my time in isolation without mentioning a particular instance of tragic irony. In the final days of my interrogation, I was once again taken to court. The journey itself was a form of torture: My hands were bound behind my back, a sack pulled tightly over my head. Only at the doors of the court in Hebron did they finally remove it. By then, my hair had grown long and my appearance, I imagine, resembled someone brought back from the dead. I entered a courtroom where journalists of all sorts and a large number of soldiers awaited me. Still bound and in my depleted condition, the journalists swarmed as I entered the courtroom. The same single question recurred across their tongues, and I felt then as if I had been brought, unknowingly, to my own execution. The question was repeated: Do you expect the death penalty?
It was a terrifying moment, a sense that all my feelings were colliding at once. Coming straight from the interrogation cells, where I had spent more than four months, I truly felt that I had been brought to this courtroom to die. I felt that my execution would be carried out right then and there. I do not know from where calm found me in that instant, but I know to whom it belongs. It was God, the Glorified and the Exalted, who steadied me, and so I entered the courtroom with a smile on my face and with my head held high. With complete calm, I answered their question about my apparently looming death. I was certain, I told them, that my release would come sooner than they imagined. The room suddenly burst with laughter, pointed roars at this prisoner marked for execution, but who was instead talking about his release. I reiterated my response several times, but the laughter and the commotion did not subside until the judge entered the room.
What I’m trying to do is place the reader of these memoirs inside the world I was living in, inside a world imposed upon me long before my time in isolation and detention. Things continued this way until the beginning of July 1997. Those were days marked by escalating confrontations with the prison administration. On the night of July 3, 1997, we were told that I had to be ready the next morning to be taken into isolation. Soon after, I sent word to the prisoner leadership in the wings that I would refuse to go, and, indeed, they supported me and urged me not to go. And that is exactly what happened: The next morning, I refused to prepare myself and refused to leave my cell. The wings were then sealed off, no one was allowed in or out. The repressive Nahshon unit was put on standby, ready to storm in and take me by force. The prisoners in my wing stood with me, as one. Standing guard, they refused to allow me to be taken unless it was under an agreement that clearly defined the duration of my confinement. The standoff continued this way until noon, when the spokesperson for the detainees emerged; he had made a decision with the prison leadership. In order to spare the prisoners a crackdown they would rather avoid, they asked me to go. I found then that I had no choice but to agree to leave even in the face of all the prisoners in our section who opposed my departure. With the help of the others, I gathered my things quickly and the Nahshon Unit took me to the inspection area. Because I had resisted, they treated me with deliberate provocation. During the search, they piled all my belongings — food, juice, clothes, sugar, salt — atop each other and shoved them into bags. They placed me into the isolated section of the bosta and drove off, announcing the beginning of my life in isolation. I would be taken to my first solitary cell, in the wing of Ramla–Ayalon known as “the old section.”
I arrived at Ramla prison in the afternoon. They brought me down along with all my belongings and began the search. I was, of course, handcuffed the entire time, and even while bound, I was made to carry my bags and move my things until the search was finally finished that night. I was then transferred from the inspection area to that dreaded solitary wing. The door shut behind me, and a new life began within those corridors of slow death. At that moment, because I had no idea what awaited me or where I was being taken, everything felt unknown and indistinct — even my own emotions were difficult to define.
I was overcome by a number of passing emotions. A fear of the unknown. The urge toward that unknown as if it were an adventure. A tension. And, finally, a sort of faith. I was calm, content with what had been written, patient and willing to endure it in anticipation of God’s reward. Though these were the bulk of my emotions, I won’t hide the truth from you: I was haunted by the thought that these people had brought me here to get rid of me, to assault me, to undermine my steadfastness, to break my will, to make me unrecognizable. Each possibility was harsher to imagine than the last, but the hardest part was that everything was now unknown. There would be no one you would speak to, and no one who would speak to you.
A Letter to My Mother after Twelve Years of Denied Visits
Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds, and prayers and peace be upon the Master of the Messengers,
My Lord, all praise and thanks are Yours for what You have given me. You freed me and my brothers from the graves of isolation where we had been buried alive. You granted me the blessing of seeing my elderly mother after they had denied me visits with her for twelve years. For all of this, I give You all the praise and gratitude.
The visit was half an hour. The first seven minutes were lost as I was unable to hear her, and she, me. I sat before her as the receiver carried no sound, and still, watched as she spoke to me with her eyes.
Oh, how beautiful those moments were, as she kissed me through a glass partition! I was a child again. My wish was only to fall in her arms, to hold her! I longed to bow and kiss her feet. Your cane pained me, mother, especially as you tried to hide it! Will you forgive me for the tears that fell despite yourself? Will you forgive my helplessness to wipe them away? I begged you, with a gesture, not to cry. Meanwhile, the child inside was weeping uncontrollably, reaching with longing for you. I searched your eyes, traced your face, placed this moment, finally, beside another, distant one. Seventeen years ago, I had come out of an interrogation wounded when your ululation broke the silence. The prisoners stood in respect, the guard rushed to silence you, but your voice broke through. A declaration of victory.
I still carry your words: “My son, Hassan, don’t you dare regret.” And today, mother, it broke me to see that tear. Because, I swear, I chose this path so that you would not have to cry. It was then that I truly felt the passage of time. We saw each other anew, startled by the sight of the other. My heart wept for your tears, for your cane, for your face, for you. It wept for my own helplessness before your pain. Forgive me, mother, forgive me!
My Mother!
Despite all the pain, my joy in seeing you was immense. To stand before you, to speak to you, to say the word “mother” and have you hear it.
We spoke quickly and widely, chatting as if in a race against time. It passed in an instant, as if only a minute had gone by. Even in that brief span, it felt like my whole life had been returned to me.
“Hassan,” they told me, “you have a visitor.” I couldn’t believe it. I was almost afraid to. But they confirmed, and the visit happened as it did. Even now, I live inside this memory. The image does not leave me. I laugh, then fall into a sadness, again and again, as I retrace every detail of our encounter.
I ask myself: will there be another visit? It is the question that plagues every prisoner; will our lives pass like this, our familial memories measured in brief visitations? I told her, jokingly: “You’re still young, mother,” though she had just passed seventy. “What if we got you married?”
She replied: “What has kept me in this life is to see you married.” It is the wish of every mother, every wife, every son and daughter, to live alongside their loved ones. And God, in His mercy, grants such relief.
She left me too quickly. It felt as though my soul, my heart, my dreams, my whole life, had abandoned me. In her leaving, it was as if she were asking that my absence not stretch too long, as if she were holding onto life for my sake. And I, my mother, hope that my imprisonment will not be much longer, that the sun of freedom will rise soon, the sun whose light we love, whose rays we long to feel unbarred and free.
My Mother!
For my sake, be patient. For you and I have a date to come, and a covenant to keep: You will remain strong, and I will endure. “Don’t regret, Hassan.” A sentence that has lived in me, still lives, and will never leave me. And how could it when my allegiance is with God! And I have a mother who said to me: “Do not regret.” That was her charge to me, first in ululation, and now in tears. And I remain between the two a witness, dignified and honorable, and I will not regret. For I have a mother who raised me in the school of her simplicity. From her, I learned the love of a homeland, the philosophy of struggle, the path of resistance. Lessons born in her utterance: “Do not regret!”
I will remain, my mother, faithful to the covenant. Steadfast and strong, I will not regret.
This piece appears in the twenty-first issue of The New York War Crimes.
Sign up for updates on the Freedom for Palestinian Political Prisoners campaign here, follow the campaign here, and take action here.