Mohammed Imran spent more than half his life in an Israeli prison. He was never supposed to get out.
Now 43, he has been imprisoned for the past 23 years in Ramon and Nafha prisons, serving 13 life terms for allegedly masterminding an ambush in Hebron during the Second Intifada, during which three Islamic Jihad fighters killed 12 Israeli soldiers, Border Police officers, and security guards in the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba.
Release seemed inconceivable. But last October, Imran found out he was on the list of prisoners set to be let out as part of the U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire agreement.
“We thought we were going home to family, companions, and loved ones,” Imran told +972. Instead he was given a choice: accept exile to Egypt with no prospect of returning to Palestine, or remain in prison for the rest of his life.
“At first I thought they were playing psychological games, or deliberately trying to ruin the moment,” Imran explained. “But soon enough, the Shin Bet confirmed the ultimatum.”
Imran was given orders not to celebrate his release, raise the Palestinian flag, distribute sweets, or even receive congratulations. “The choice was between exile or death in prison,” he said. “I chose freedom, and with it, I was born again.”
His release came after two years that he describes as the harshest in over two decades behind bars, during which his weight dropped from 95 to 68 kilograms. “After October 7, I was subjected to systematic humiliation, torture, and starvation,” Imran said — conditions that are known to have resulted, directly or indirectly, in the deaths of around 100 Palestinians in Israeli prisons and detention centers since the start of the Gaza war.
The practice of deporting Palestinian prisoners is not new. In the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap deal of 2011, for example, dozens of Palestinian prisoners were deported to Qatar, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus.
“Deportation absorbs the anger of the Israeli street, which rejects the release of prisoners who were sentenced to life,” Aziz Al-Masri, a Palestinian analyst from Gaza now based in Cairo, told +972. “It is a psychological and moral punishment separating the prisoner from his land and community, and places him in a state of permanent alienation.”
Nearly 2,000 Palestinians prisoners were released in the October ceasefire, most of whom had not been charged with any crime. Two-hundred-and-fifty of them were serving long or life sentences, of whom 154 were exiled to Egypt.
Imran was one of only 30 prisoners whose family members were allowed to visit them in exile. In early December, his sister came to stay for about a week, during which he was not permitted to leave Cairo’s Renaissance Hotel where the released prisoners had been put up.
One day, he decided, without asking permission, to move to a rented apartment in a suburb of the city, where his sister prepared maqluba. “The dish carried the flavor of my country, the scent of mother, and a memory not yet confiscated,” he said.
From prison to limbo
Not all of the prisoners exiled to Egypt will stay there. At their Cairo hotel, representatives from Egyptian intelligence coordinated migration applications to third countries. For most of them, however, the screening process will mark them as risky additions, potentially leaving Egypt as their only option.
“There are security concerns relating to the possibility of Israeli assassinations,” Muhammad Rashad, a major general and former deputy head of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service, explained. “This poses a direct threat to national security given their fundamental connection to Palestinian [militant] movements and their inability or unwillingness to separate from them.”
In the past, Al-Masri noted, exiled Palestinian prisoners have continued to play influential political roles in these movements — joining Hamas’ international political bureau, for example, or coordinating the rebuilding of armed networks in the West Bank. They include Saleh Al-Arouri, Zaher Jabarin, and Husam Badran, who were deported in the Shalit deal and took up residence in Lebanon, Turkey, and Qatar, respectively.
“While none of them were arrested, some, like Al-Arouri in Lebanon, were assassinated,” Al-Masri explained. “More recently, Jabarin, currently in Qatar, survived repeated assassination attempts. The fear of betrayal in exile is not imagined. It is based on a long record of systematic assassinations.”
Imran, along with 15 other Palestinian prisoners exiled to Egypt, decided to register to move to Brazil, which recently intervened in support of South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (at the time of writing, he is still in Egypt waiting to move).
In the application form, he saw that a local Brazilian NGO was offering permanent residency, a monthly subsistence grant of $500 per individual for up to a year, and free housing. He added that Brazil is also coordinating with human rights organizations and Israeli authorities to facilitate family reunification, including with spouses, children, siblings, and parents.
Turkey has reportedly welcomed some of the exiled prisoners — initially providing them with free accommodation and a monthly allowance, after which they must manage their own affairs. The freed prisoners I spoke to said they were also offered the option of resettlement in Malaysia and Iraq.
Still, Egypt may be their safest option given the fact that Egypt is formally at peace with Israel. “This makes it difficult for Tel Aviv to engage in extra-judicial pursuits inside Egyptian territory for fear of harming bilateral relations — which makes Egypt even safer for the [exiles] than Palestine,” Rashad, the former Egyptian intelligence head, explained.
Relearning freedom
After 29 years in Israeli prisons, Mahmoud Al-Ardah is another who is now navigating freedom in Egypt — and new technology, such as smartphones, which had not been part of his life before incarceration.
“I was 12 the first time I was captured,” Al-Ardah told +972. That was in 1992. He was soon released, but four years later he was arrested again and sentenced to life in prison plus 15 years for belonging to Islamic Jihad and allegedly participating in attacks on Israeli soldiers.
Having briefly tasted freedom in 2021 after tunneling out of Gilboa Prison before being recaptured, he said he is once again “experiencing the very idea of life itself.”
Soon after his release, he got engaged to a young Jordanian woman — a match arranged by his family. “For the first time in my life, I bought a suit to wear at the wedding,” he said.
Unlike many of the other released prisoners, Al-Ardah, who is currently receiving financial support from his family, prefers to stay in Egypt.“I don’t think Egypt will expel us,” he said.
Another of the exiles in Egypt, Kamil Abu Hanish, a founder of the military wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, made it through his 22 years behind bars by seeking refuge in his imagination. He became one of the most well-known Palestinian prisoners as a prolific writer, publishing 16 novels and various essays, poetry, and articles.
“In my mind, I summoned every flower I didn’t pick, every sea breeze I didn’t inhale, every moment of life lost between the bars,” he told +972. “This was my alternative reality.”
In his novel “The Seventh Dimension” — one of 10 books chosen for the recent 2026 Cairo International Book Fair — he imagines wandering in distant mountains, picking flowers, confiding his secrets to the sea, and dreaming of a family that doesn’t exist.
Now in his 50s, Abu Hanish was given nine life sentences after his arrest in 2003 for allegedly killing five Israelis during the Second Intifada. “Countless sentences were issued against me, but in the end, I got out against their will,” he said.
In prison, Abu Hanish completed a master’s degree in Israeli affairs and helped establish the Palestinian Prisoner Movement for Education. The project — now run by Marwan Barghouti — enables prisoners to take courses for credit at Al-Quds Open University, with classes and exams conducted inside prison.
“This allowed less educated prisoners the opportunity to learn from their educated peers, even up to the master’s level,” Abu Hanish explained.
Ahmed Duheidi, 44, was imprisoned in 2003 for his alleged involvement in a shooting attack that killed an Israeli security guard. During his 23 years in Israeli prisons, he, too, pursued higher education, completing two master’s degrees — the first in economics and political science, and the second in Middle East studies.
After being deported to Egypt, he was able to reunite with his brother for 12 days. “Israel expelled me from my homeland to my second homeland — Egyptians are my family too,” Duheidi told +972. He got engaged to an Egyptian woman in December, and together they signed up to migrate to Brazil (but remain in Egypt at the time of writing).
Abu Hanish did not pursue relocation to Brazil. He was worried about culture shock, and after the Trump administration’s kidnapping of the Venezuelan president and his wife in early January, he feared that Israel would recapture and imprison him if he moved to the western hemisphere.
Hussein Ghawadreh was 16 when he received a life sentence in 2013 for allegedly stabbing an Israeli soldier on a bus. Many of his relatives have also spent time in Israeli prisons, mostly as a result of alleged involvement in attacks during the Second Intifada.
Four of his cousins were released with him in the ceasefire and deported to Egypt; one other cousin who was released was allowed to return to the family in the West Bank. Ghawadreh hoped to relocate to Turkey — which, he said, “combines European culture and modernity on the one hand, and a Muslim society on the other” — but his application was rejected.
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At that point, he said, he realized that freedom is not simply getting out of prison: “It’s the ability to be a complete human being, to move, to choose, to dream.”
“I always believed that a prisoner’s destiny is to be free one day,” he continued. “I still want to be a free person. I want to be rid of the chains and humiliation.”
This article was published in collaboration with Egab, a tech start-up empowering journalists from the Global South to get published in the international media.
