On the night Basim Khandakji’s novel won the 2024 Arabic Booker Prize, Israeli guards barged into his cell, assaulted him, bound his hands and feet, and threatened him.
The 42-year-old was then placed in a cell at Ofer Prison for 12 days.
He believes it was in retaliation for embarrassing the Israeli prison system and drawing attention to himself and the situation he faced by publishing a book in front of the guards.
He is currently out of an Israeli prison after serving 21 years on three life sentences.
“I still feel like I’m dreaming and I’m worried that I’ll wake up and be back in the cell again,” Kandakji said.
Even after his release, he has not been able to return home to his family in Nablus. Exiled from his homeland by Israel, he is currently waiting in Egypt as his family fights to get him back.
“We saw a new horror”
While Khandakji is happy to have escaped the “grave of the living” in an Israeli prison, he is still trying to process the horrors he saw there and the sadness he felt at leaving the other prisoners behind.
He served in a “military cell” in 2004 and was convicted of taking part in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, a crime he says he was forced to confess to.
“The lawyer asked me to sign a confession … so that three young men could be spared a life sentence. In exchange for freeing some young men from a life sentence, you had a kind of quid pro quo where you admitted to certain charges. And that’s what happened.”
The United Nations estimates that at least 75 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023, and organizations such as B’Tselem and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights have revealed systematic abuse.
Kandakji spent months at a time in solitary confinement and often moved between prisons, spending time in most of Israel’s 19 facilities holding Palestinians, each one as “hellish” as the last, he told Al Jazeera.
“There are deliberate policies of starvation, abuse, mental and physical torture, constant humiliation, and deliberate medical neglect.”
Images of freed Palestinian detainees sparked outrage around the world. Although they appeared vibrant and healthy in photos before being incarcerated, upon release many were emaciated, emaciated shadows of their former selves.
According to Kandakji, things have changed since October 7, 2023. On that day, a Hamas-led attack killed 1,139 people in Israel and captured about 250, and in response Israel launched a two-year genocidal war in Gaza.
Kandakji said prisoners began dying with shocking regularity and that guards used “new and gruesome methods” against prisoners, especially those rounded up in hundreds from the Gaza Strip.
“Prisoners witnessed guards hanging the bodies of dead prisoners in their cells and leaving them there to decompose,” he said.
“Another person said he saw more than a dozen corpses stuffed into cells at al-Jalama detention center.”
Kandakji says the harrowing memories of the Palestinians who died and the brutal torture he witnessed and experienced will haunt him for the rest of his life.
“The main strategy used by the authorities to free prisoners was starvation,” he said. “There was also ‘air conditioning,’ which meant denying clothing, blankets, and heat during the harsh winter months.
“There were also constant beatings,” he added. “They use horribly barbaric methods that target the head, neck and spine.”
Al Jazeera contacted Israeli prison authorities for comment on Kandakji’s accusations, but did not receive a response.
He added that although he was prohibited from communicating with friends and family and had no access to news from the outside world, he received news of his father’s death.
“I was robbed of my father while he was alive, and after his death I was not given the opportunity to bury him,” he said.
Nearly 9,000 Palestinians remain in Israeli prisons, many of them rounded up, and more than 3,500 held in “administrative detention.” Administrative detention was established by Israel to justify imprisoning people indefinitely without charge or trial.
Smuggle an award-winning novel
In prison, Kandakji says: “Writing gave me…a refuge, a place to hide. Through it I was able to escape the brutality of prison and regain my freedom, even if only in my imagination.”
He had to go on hunger strikes multiple times to get a notebook and pen.
He wrote as much as he could, hiding his manuscripts from the guards and staying out of their way until he could smuggle them out through lawyers and other visitors.
In 2023, his award-winning novel A Mask, The Color of the Sky was published in Lebanon in Arabic and was shortlisted for the International Arabic Novel Prize, known as the Arabic Booker.
The book tells the story of Nur, a Palestinian archaeologist who finds an Israeli identity card, assumes the identity of “Ur,” and ends up participating in an archaeological excavation of an illegal Israeli settlement.
In it, Kandakji reflects on the unraveling of Palestine’s antiquity and the difference between the restricted life of Nur, who had a Palestinian identity card, and Ur, who could go anywhere with a sky-blue ID.
Enraged upon hearing of his selection on the shortlist, ultranationalist Israeli Minister of State Security Itamar Ben Gvir demanded tough conditions for Kandakji, while others on the Israeli far right called for his death.
His award included a $50,000 cash prize and funding for an English translation, paving the way for a global audience.
When Israel began its war on Gaza, conditions in the prison worsened, and guards confiscated Kandakji’s writing materials and broke his reading glasses.
He said he felt “completely helpless.” “Having my pen and notebook taken away felt like I was being robbed of air.”
Now a free man, he aims to publish another novel he wrote in his head during his final years in captivity. The work is based on one of his close friends, the writer Walid Dhaka, who died of cancer due to alleged deliberate medical neglect by prison authorities.
Besides writing, Kandakji’s only solace in prison was the friendships he made that “even death can’t erase.”
“I live with sadness and pain because I left many friends behind bars and they are still suffering,” he added.
One of the friends he shared the cell with was Fatah politician Marwan Barghoshi, who was sentenced in 2004 to five life sentences plus 40 years in prison.
Barghoutsi is often compared to South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela because of his decades of imprisonment as a political prisoner and his unifying popularity among Palestinians.
“Marwan Barghousi is a great person,” he said. “If he is released, he could be the person who unifies the nation.”
The 66-year-old was beaten unconscious by Israeli prison authorities last month, and his father told international media he feared for his life as Israel continued to ignore international calls for his release.
his homeland lives within him
Kandakji was arrested in 2004 at the age of 21, in his final year of a journalism and political science degree at An-Nadja National University in his hometown of Nablus.
Kandakji, who grew up in a socialist family, became active in the Palestinian People’s Party as a teenager. He is currently an elected member of the party’s Politburo.
However, during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, he decided to join the armed resistance movement of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Looking back, he says: “At the end of the day, all forms of violence are inhumane.
“As human beings, we should first try to resolve problems through peaceful and civilized means,” Kandakji said. “But when someone tries to erase you, to make you disappear, your struggle becomes your very existence.
“But if I could go back in time…I might look for another path,” he added, looking for another path that didn’t take away his family for 21 years.
He was one of 250 high-profile detainees released by Israel on October 13 as part of the US-brokered Gaza ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel.
Israeli prisoners held by Hamas were released in exchange for about 2,000 Palestinian detainees, most of whom were “disappeared” from Gaza by Israel, according to the United Nations.
Kandakji described the night he was released as “terrifying,” adding that he was shaking because “I felt like my moment of freedom had finally come.”
As he passed through the prison gates and the bus headed south instead of towards Nablus, he realized that he was about to be denied complete freedom.
“Being exiled from your homeland is a searing and painful emotion,” he said. “My first joys, my first sorrows and my first dreams were all in my city of Nablus.
“Palestinians, unlike other peoples, do not live in a homeland. The homeland is within them,” he said.
For now, Kandakji plans to continue writing and pursue a doctorate after earning a master’s degree in Israeli studies while incarcerated.
His family is fighting desperately to be reunited with him in Egypt, but they are repeatedly thwarted by Israel.
“I still hope that human justice exists so that I can hug my mother in the coming times,” he says.
“Not as a freed prisoner, but simply as a child seeking the scent of childhood in his mother’s arms.”
