Khalida Jarrar

“I was shut inside a grave,” Khalida Jarrar said on 19 January 2025, emaciated and white-haired, on her release from Israeli solitary confinement in the prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas. She was born in Nablus on 9 February 1963, took her schooling there, and studied business administration at Birzeit University, graduating in 1985 and later earning a master’s degree in democracy and human rights in 2003. Politically active from a young age in the voluntary work committees of the West Bank, she was first arrested on 8 March 1989, during the First Intifada, after a demonstration on International Women’s Day. She directed the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association from 1994 to 2005 and served as vice chair of its board until 2017; Israel banned her from travel from 1998, relenting only in 2010, under diplomatic pressure, so she could seek treatment abroad for a cerebral infarction. In January 2006 she was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine ticket, held the council’s prisoners portfolio, and sat on the national committee preparing Palestine’s accession to the International Criminal Court.

Then came the years of revolving detention. In August 2014 the occupation authorities ordered her deported to Jericho; she refused — “I will not comply with this deportation order; it is my right to remain in my place of residence” — and staged a sit-in at the PLC headquarters until the order lapsed. Arrested in April 2015 and charged with membership and leadership of a banned organization, she was sentenced to some fifteen months while diplomats and international organizations attended the proceedings and the UN and Amnesty International called for her release. Administrative detention followed from July 2017 to February 2019 — renewed three times, spanning her father’s death — and another arrest in October 2019 brought a 24-month sentence in March 2021 for being a leading member of “a banned organization.” When her younger daughter Suha died suddenly on 11 July 2021, the Israel Prison Service refused to let her attend the funeral; thousands of Palestinians walked in it chanting “O Jarrar, we are all your daughters.”

Released in September 2021, she went first to her daughter’s grave, then back to work as a researcher on prisoners’ rights at Birzeit’s Muwatin Institute. Israeli forces re-arrested her on 26 December 2023 in the West Bank crackdown that followed the outbreak of the Gaza war, and in August 2024 she was moved to solitary confinement in a two-metre cell in al-Ramle. From the sixteenth day of that isolation she wrote, in a letter relayed by her lawyer: “They have left me with no air to breathe… I am suffocating in my cell, waiting for the hours to pass and hoping to find a few molecules of oxygen I can breathe to remain alive.” The Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who has called her “the Palestinian political Prisoner Number One,” wrote in Haaretz that she has never been convicted of anything but the political offence of membership — “She is a prisoner of conscience in Israel.” Four days after her 2025 release she told al-Mayadeen she would carry on “until my people — and all peoples of the world — have achieved freedom from colonial domination,” adding: “The occupation can imprison everything and anything except these feelings.”

Sources

• Khalida Jarrar — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
• Khalida Jarrar (PFLP) — European Council on Foreign Relations, Mapping Palestinian Politics