In August, a 13-second video made the rounds on Israel’s right-wing Telegram channels — and electrified Palestinians.
In the video, Israel’s far-right minister of national security Itamar Ben-Gvir lectures a gaunt, elderly man. “You will not win,” the ultranationalist leader of the Jewish Power party says.
Before the man can answer, the video cuts out.
It was the first public sighting in years of a man Palestinian admirers have called their “Mandela”: Marwan Barghouti.
Jailed for the past two decades for his role in the second intifada, the 66-year-old Barghouti is — by far — the most popular Palestinian leader since Yasser Arafat.
He was deported to Jordan in the 1980s, led armed resistance against Israel’s occupation in the early 2000s, helped organise university classes in an Israeli prison, and embraced negotiations and the two-state solution.
Arrested in 2002, when he ran Tanzim, the armed wing of Arafat’s Fatah party, he was handed five life sentences by an Israeli court on counts of murder and membership of a terrorist organisation, after declining to offer a defence and refusing to recognise its authority.
Though he has barely been seen or heard from since, polls show Barghouti is popular enough to unite disparate Palestinian factions — Islamists like Hamas, secular nationalists like Fatah, and leftist revolutionaries like the PFLP — into a single opposition to Israel.
And so, when Israel let out nearly 2,000 prisoners from its jails this week to secure the release of its remaining hostages from Hamas captivity, Barghouti was not among them.
While most of those released had not even been put on trial, let alone convicted, 250 of them were what Israel calls “heavies” like Barghouti, convicted on terror charges for their role in the killing of Israeli civilians. But unlike Barghouti, they were not famous.
“It’s really simple — Israel is willing to release people who did really bad things, but not those who are famous,” said Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli brigadier general. “It has no interest to release symbols.”
Influential leaders like Barghouti “will bring more incitement and degrade the security situation”, said Avivi. “We don’t view him as somebody who is about peace. He is a very radical person.”
In the negotiations that led to this current ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, Barghouti’s name was near the top of Hamas’s “VIP list” of prisoners it wanted Israel to release, according to an Israeli official.
In exchange, Israel would get back 20 living hostages, and the bodies of 28 — the last of the 251 hostages Hamas took in its October 7 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the two-year war in Gaza.
Qatar, one of the main intermediaries between Israel and Hamas, was said to support the bid to free Barghouti, two people familiar with the process said, seeing him as a unifying force that could galvanise the Palestinian Authority, which has limited self-rule in parts of the occupied West Bank.
“They understand that Palestinian politics needs renewal and they want that transition to be a peaceful transition through elections,” said Arab Barghouti, Marwan’s son. “He’s someone who can be a voice of reason, who’s trusted, who has wisdom to know how to try to transition to the next period, where we unify the Palestinian people.”
The PA is despised not only by the Israeli right but by many Palestinians, who see it as simultaneously corrupt and impotent. It has failed to hold elections since 2006, lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007 and has since 2004 been run by 89-year-old Mahmoud Abbas and a group of loyalists.
By contrast, supporters consider Barghouti, who co-authored a 2006 document seen as a road map for uniting rival Palestinian factions, as ideologically steadfast.
“The vast majority of Palestinians have never seen him or heard his speeches [but] everything that he’s written and talked about has always been centring Palestinian freedom first,” said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer who has worked on prior peace talks with Abbas. “So for generations people know him, love him and view him as their Mandela.”
His family lives in Ramallah, and fellow prisoners have described their time with him as transformative. Barghouti taught classes inside an Israeli prison — nicknamed the Hadarim Open University — urging Palestinian detainees to study and get distance learning degrees.
Conditions in Israeli prisons — which come under the purview of Ben-Gvir, the ultranationalist leader who harangued Barghouti in the video — have deteriorated severely since October 7 2023, according to human rights groups, Israeli medical whistleblowers and testimony from released prisoners.
Israel’s security dragnet rounded up thousands more Palestinians, stuffing them into already overcrowded prisons, with guards accused of meting out beatings and food rations cut, according to rights groups.
At least 70 have died in Israeli custody since the war began, they said, and Ben-Gvir has bragged of making prison conditions harsher.
For Barghouti, that has in effect meant nearly two years of solitary confinement, according to his lawyers, family and released detainees, during which one former prisoner who spoke to the Financial Times said he would shout instructions to inmates to keep studying.
His lawyers, family and released detainees say Barghouti has been beaten by Israeli prison guards on multiple occasions, most recently last month.
Peering out of the small windows of their cells in Israel’s Megiddo prison, Palestinian detainees saw guards drag an unconscious man into a nearby cell, according to testimony from released prisoners to his family. Two of them glimpsed him as he was taken past, and saw blood, according to their testimony.
As the man gained consciousness, they realised that their new neighbour was none other than Barghouti, who told them he had been beaten while being transported.
“These are false claims,” the Israel Prison Service said. “The Israel Prison Service operates in accordance with the law, while ensuring the safety and health of all inmates.”
Barghouti also told them, according to his son Arab, what happened in the rest of the video with Ben-Gvir, following the ultranationalist’s tirade. “My father’s reply, according to the prisoners, to Ben-Gvir was: ‘I see a lot of grey hair on your head. Will you never mature and grow up?’”
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