On her first day of freedom, Bushra al-Tawil was enjoying her morning coffee and looking forward to lunch when we arrived at the family’s apartment in Ramallah.
“In prison it was just hummus, hummus, hummus. Now I can have something different,” she joked.
There were hugs from family and friends in the kitchen, her mother sat at the table and watched, happy that her only daughter was finally home because of the Gaza ceasefire agreement that saw Hamas begin releasing hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons on Sunday.
The 32-year-old journalist spent more than five years in Israeli prisons at different times.
She has always been held without charge, most recently since March 2024, except on one occasion when she was prosecuted for a speech she gave in a mosque.
“I am a journalist, she said. “I have the right to express myself.”
This is not the first time that Bushra al-Tawil has been part of a prisoner exchange.
In 2011, she was released along with 1,000 other Palestinian prisoners as part of a deal to free Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who had been held hostage in Gaza for more than five years.
Not long after that deal, she was quickly re-arrested by Israeli forces.
She said that during the various arrests, they beat her badly, threatened to shoot her in the leg and put out the cigarette on her back.
In the prison, he says, the guards are humiliated every day.
“The worst thing is that they didn’t let me wear a headscarf,” she said.
– And when we entered the prison for the first time, they made me strip naked.
Israel’s prison service said all prisoners are being treated in accordance with the law.
The young journalism graduate with glasses is a conservative Muslim.
In the living room, on the wall is a picture of her father, Jamal al-Tawil, a prominent Hamas politician in the occupied West Bank.
He is the former mayor of the village of al-Bireh, not far from Ramallah. He spent more than 19 years in an Israeli prison.
I asked Bushra if he supports Hamas.
“I don’t want to be arrested again,” she said, refusing to answer.
I also asked her if she had any sympathy for the three Israeli hostages, young women like her, who were released Sunday from more than a year of Hamas captivity in Gaza.
“We have to come home and they have to come home,” she said.
“The hostages meant I was out. As long as there are hostages, prisoners like me will get their freedom.”
Thirty more Israeli hostages are expected to be freed in the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, in exchange for around 1,800 more Palestinian prisoners.
Some of these prisoners were convicted of much more serious crimes, including multiple murders.
They will likely be deported outside of Israel and the Palestinian territories to countries such as Qatar and Turkey.
But all the Palestinians freed on Sunday, including several children, were convicted of relatively minor offenses.
Many, like Bushr, have never been charged at all and are being held in Israeli prisons under so-called “administrative detention,” a process that human rights groups have strongly condemned.
The Israeli military says it often cannot release details of the charges people face, even to prisoners and their lawyers, for security reasons, to avoid revealing the identity of informants.
