Citrus trees bearing plenty of low-hanging fruits dot the lush orchard of the Barghoutis’ home in the occupied West Bank.
Perched on a high hill in the village of Kobar, northwest of Ramallah, it overlooks vast green plains. The orchard is alive with the winter rain, yet the hands that planted it never got to see it bloom.
Aman Nafi’, a gentle, 59-year-old woman, pulls a stack of photos placed on a cupboard next to the front door. They are of her husband, the longest serving Palestinian prisoner Nael Barghouti, during the brief three years he spent outside Israeli prisons since 1978.
“Nael was re-imprisoned after he planted all these trees – they grew in his absence,” Nafi’ tells Mondoweiss in sorrow.
“He never got to taste the fruits of his labour,” she continues, holding up a photo dated June 16, 2013, of a white-bearded Barghouti planting a tree in his yard.
The issue of Palestinian prisoners has risen to the fore in parallel with Israel’s ongoing assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, in which more than 27,000 Palestinians have been killed – the majority of them women and children – while 61,830 others have been wounded, in what has been described globally as a genocide.
Since October 7, when the Gaza-based Hamas resistance group launched an attack on Israeli territory killing 1,139 people, Israeli occupation forces have carried out daily mass arrests in the occupied West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.
At least 6,460 Palestinians have been arrested in the past 119 days in what rights groups deem collective punishment, the majority of them held without trial or charge under Israel’s “administrative detention” policy.
At least seven Palestinian prisoners have also died or were killed in Israeli custody – and dozens of others with severe to moderate injuries – the vast majority of them in the days and weeks after their arrest. Countless testimonies, videos and images of Israeli soldiers torturing, humiliating, beating, and stripping naked Palestinian men during arrests have emerged, spurring comparisons online with the torture carried out by United States forces in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.
“This is a revenge operation and collective punishment,” says Amany Sarahneh, spokesperson for the Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS).
“It is an attempt to scare Palestinians and deter them from resisting their occupation in any kind of way,” she told Mondoweiss.