Muhammad Shehada · ‘I would never release him’: Marwan Barghouti and Palestine’s future
‘I would never release him’Muhammad Shehada
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Vol. 48 No. 12 · 9 July 2026
‘I would never release him’<br>Muhammad Shehada on Marwan Barghouti and Palestine’s future
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‘You made a serious mistake by leaving Gaza,’ my friend Ibrahim used to say. ‘Come back!’ Ibrahim was one of the lucky few. Despite Israel’s blockade – which created the ‘worst economic depression in modern history’, as a World Bank report put it – Ibrahim had found a way to earn a decent living. We studied computer engineering together at Gaza’s Islamic University, and afterwards Ibrahim and a few other friends set up a programming team, with customers in the Gulf, Europe and the US.<br>Ibrahim got a small apartment in Jabalia, bought an old car, married and had a child. His daily routine was simple: work, the mosque, seeing friends in a café. There wasn’t much to do in tiny, overcrowded Gaza City even if you had money, but he was always upbeat. His main concern was his son, Mohammed, who was showing signs of PTSD. Mohammed didn’t talk until he was three; he had nightmares, wet the bed and had tantrums. By the age of four he had lived through a war, in 2021, and two Israeli assaults – Operation Breaking Dawn in 2022 and Operation Shield and Arrow in 2023. In between bombing campaigns, Israeli drones were always buzzing overhead.<br>On the morning of 7 October 2023 I tried to call Ibrahim, but the electricity was down. I got hold of him a few days later. ‘I’m sorry I told you to come back,’ he said. ‘You were right not to listen. Please remember us.’ He had to hang up: he and his family were gathering their things because Israel had ordered 1.1 million people to move to the south of Gaza. That’s when Ibrahim realised he had been living precariously all along. In the months that followed, the family were forcibly displaced more than ten times. Each time they followed Israel’s ‘evacuation orders’ and walked under fire to a designated ‘safe area’, before that too was bombed or overrun with soldiers.<br>The first programmer I know who was murdered in a targeted strike was Haitham. His two children had already been killed by a bomb in Rafah. He and his wife, who had been injured in that attack, fled to the Bureij refugee camp, only to be killed in a direct strike there. Abdul Rahman, the top student in our class, was next. He was killed as he walked into his apartment with his father to collect food; his family were sheltering nearby. Musab, another member of the programming team, was killed soon after in a strike on a UN school.<br>After Ibrahim and his family left Jabalia, the Israeli army burned his apartment to the ground and bombed his parents’ home; a few months later they flattened the entire city. His life savings evaporated within months as some prices increased more than 6000 per cent. He’s been unable to work because there has been no electricity in Gaza, except for emergency generators, since October 2023 and Israel doesn’t allow computers to be brought into the Strip. Living in a heavily damaged apartment in a bombed-out building is now a luxury. Ibrahim sleeps in an old tent, waking in the night to protect his son from rats and snakes, whose numbers have grown hugely in the rubble and waste. Israel doesn’t allow in the equipment needed to clear and repair the damage, which is not only to buildings and roads but to pipes and sewage systems. These have become breeding grounds for rodents and insects. Around a thousand Gazans have been killed since Trump’s ‘ceasefire’ came into force last autumn. For Ibrahim, it feels as though the world has fallen silent since then.<br>Ibrahim describes the Hamas-led operation of 7 October as a ‘disaster’, even though he supports the right to armed resistance. Arab mediators have told me that Hamas’s leader in exile, Khaled Meshal, has been using the same word in private. Ahmed Yousef – a former adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, the chair of Hamas’s political bureau until his assassination in 2024...