Marwan Barghouti

“Israel has established a dual legal regime, a form of judicial apartheid, that provides virtual impunity for Israelis who commit crimes against Palestinians, while criminalizing Palestinian presence and resistance,” Marwan Barghouti wrote in The New York Times in 2017, as he led a thousand Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike. “Israel’s courts are a charade of justice, clearly instruments of colonial, military occupation.” He was born on 6 June 1959 in the village of Kobar near Ramallah, one of seven children of a manual labourer, and had just turned eight when the occupation of the West Bank began. He joined Fatah in his mid-teens, was arrested at eighteen — he later described being beaten and sexually humiliated under interrogation — and spent four and a half years in prison. Released in 1983, he studied history and political science at Birzeit University and rose as a student leader in the years before the First Intifada, until Israel deported him to Jordan in May 1987, months before it began. He returned in 1993 under the Oslo Accords, and in 1994 became secretary-general of Fatah in the West Bank.

During the Second Intifada he was a major leader of the uprising — a man who, as a Fatah colleague put it, led demonstrations in a T-shirt and trousers and was seen as close to his people. Israel accuses him of having established the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and of directing attacks; he has always denied controlling the Brigades. Tracked through a wiretap, he was arrested in 2002, refused to mount a defence — disputing the court’s legitimacy — and in 2004 was convicted of planning attacks that killed five people and sentenced to five consecutive life sentences. An inquiry by the Inter-Parliamentary Union found “numerous breaches of international law” in the trial. His own recorded positions cut across the caricature: in his last television interview, to Channel 4 News in 2006, he said, “Nobody can justify killing civilians, women and children anywhere in this world… They should be outside of the game, in Palestine or in Israel,” while maintaining that “the Palestinian people have the full right to resist the Israeli occupation.” He urged Hamas toward elections rather than armed struggle, and helped draft the 2006 National Conciliation Document of the Prisoners with leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the PFLP.

In prison he learned fluent Hebrew and English, taught university classes, endured a three-year stretch of solitary confinement, and earned a Cairo University doctorate in 2010 with a thesis on Palestinian democracy smuggled out one page at a time by his lawyer. Opinion polls have long made him the most popular Palestinian politician; Palestinians often call him the “Palestinian Mandela,” and in 2021 he co-led the Freedom electoral list with Nasser Kidwa before Mahmoud Abbas cancelled the elections. Hamas sought his release in the 2011 exchange and again in the negotiations of October 2025; Israel refused each time — reporting placed the veto with the prime minister’s office and the far-right minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who in August 2025 was filmed threatening Barghouti in his cell, footage condemned by the UN human rights chief Volker Türk. Since October 2023 his family and fellow prisoners report confiscated books, rationed food, and, in September 2025, a beating by eight guards that broke four ribs and left him unconscious. Former Israeli intelligence chiefs Ami Ayalon and Efraim Halevy are among those who have called for his release; Halevy told Israeli public radio in February 2025 that Barghouti “is popular with his people, he has a clear position, he speaks Hebrew well and can negotiate, all of which qualifies him to lead a new path.”

Sources

• Who is Marwan Barghouti and why won’t Israel release him? — Middle East Eye
• Marwan Barghouti — European Council on Foreign Relations, Mapping Palestinian Politics