'The hostages meant I got out': Freed Palestinian prisoner welcomes Gaza deal

On her first day of freedom, Bushra Tawil was enjoying her morning coffee and looking forward to lunch when we met her at her family’s apartment in Ramallah. “In prison, it was hummus, hummus, hummus. Now, I can eat something different,” she joked.

In the kitchen, family and friends embraced her as her mother sat at the table watching, overjoyed that her only daughter was finally home. This was thanks to the Gaza ceasefire deal that prompted Hamas to begin releasing hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails on Sunday. The 32-year-old journalist has spent more than five years in Israeli prisons over several stints.

She had been held without charge, most recently since March 2024, with only one exception, when she was prosecuted for giving a speech in a mosque. “I am a journalist,” she said. “I have the right to express my opinion.” This is not the first time Bushra Tawil has been involved in a prisoner exchange.

In 2011, she was released along with 1,000 other Palestinian prisoners as part of a deal to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held by Hamas in Gaza for more than five years. However, she was quickly re-arrested by Israeli forces soon after that deal was struck. She says during her multiple arrests, she was beaten, threatened with being shot in the legs and had cigarettes extinguished on her back.

In prison, she says, she was humiliated daily by prison guards. “The worst thing was not being allowed to wear my hijab,” she said. “When we first entered the prison, I was asked to take off all my clothes.” The Israeli prison service says all prisoners are treated fairly under the law. The young, bespectacled journalism graduate is a conservative Muslim.

In the living room, a picture of her father, Jamal Tawil, a prominent Hamas politician in the occupied West Bank, hangs on the wall. He is a former mayor of the village of al-Bireh, outside Ramallah. He has spent more than 19 years in Israeli prisons. I asked Bushra if she supports Hamas. “I don’t want to be arrested again,” she said, declining to answer.

I also asked her if she had any sympathy for the three Israeli hostages, young women like herself, who were released on Sunday after being held by Hamas in Gaza for more than a year. “We got to go home and they got to go home,” she said. “Hostages mean I get released. As long as there are hostages, prisoners like me will be free.”

It is expected that more than 30 Israeli hostages will be released in the first phase of the ceasefire deal in exchange for some 1800 Palestinian prisoners. Some of those prisoners were convicted of more serious crimes, including multiple murders. They will likely be deported to countries outside of Israel and the Palestinian territories, such as Qatar and Turkey. But all the Palestinians released on Sunday, which included several children, were convicted of relatively minor offenses.

Many, like Bushra, were never charged with any crime and were held in Israeli prisons in what is known as “administrative detention,” a process strongly condemned by human rights groups. The Israeli military argues that for security reasons, they are often unable to publish details of the charges people face, even to those detained and their lawyers, to avoid revealing the identity of informants.