The Electronic Intifada 4 December 2025
Front row, third from right: Hady Thaher and Mumin Thaher — behind them is their father Adham — alongside their cousin Muhammad Thaher on 13 October 2025. Hady, Mumin and Muhammad are all still wearing their gray prison uniforms. They had just been freed from Israeli detention. (Photo courtesy of the author)
On 19 October 2024, my family and I were huddled together in silence. The Israeli army was close, besieging the Indonesian Hospital.
For three weeks, we were trapped inside our house in Jabaliya refugee camp until, on 10 November, the army ordered those who remained in our neighborhood to evacuate.
My family and I decided to go towards western Gaza City, so we packed some of our clothes and some provisions, including flour.
The next day, 11 November, around 3 pm, my family and I started walking: My grandmother, my mother, my little sister and I were pacing while my father Adham, along with my three brothers, Hady, Mumin and Muhammad, took turns pushing my grandfather in his wheelchair.
After around five kilometers, we reached Salah al-Din Street, east of Jabaliya, where there was an Israeli checkpoint.
It was mandatory – by military order – to pass through this checkpoint.
There were Israeli soldiers, with some on tanks, ordering the females to cross, but at speed and without looking back.
The males were separated and interrogated.
My mother and I pushed my grandfather. My grandmother and my seven-year-old sister Ghazal followed.
After nearly three hours of waiting, my father and my 17-year-old brother Muhammad finally appeared.
Hady and Mumin did not.
We grew anxious. We waited, but they still didn’t come.
Strenuous months
With night approaching, however, we had to move on to find somewhere to stay.
We spent the next 12 hours searching for a shelter in western Gaza City before finally settling near Al-Shifa Hospital.
Then a new and exhausting ordeal began: trying to find out what had happened to my two brothers.
Relatives and friends who had crossed the checkpoints earlier told us that the Israeli army was detaining all young men.
We called every humanitarian organization we knew that handles Palestinian detainees – the Commission of Detainees Affairs, the human rights group Addameer, the human rights NGO HaMoked and the International Committee of the Red Cross – hoping for any information about my brothers.
We received nothing.
A month later, on 11 December, the ICRC called my father and told him that both of his sons were imprisoned in the notorious Sde Teiman military camp.
No other information was disclosed.
My father dropped the phone, telling us the news with tear-filled eyes.
My mother collapsed.
I broke down crying.
My brothers are incredibly close to me.
Mumin, 23, had been studying programming at the Islamic University of Gaza.
I was his confidante. He would tell me everything – the challenges he faced, the occasional low grades, his emotions and his hopes of career success.
Even after the genocide began, he continued studying right until the day he was taken.
Hady, 25, had studied physical education and was applying for scholarships to pursue a master’s degree. He worked as an athletics coach, and he always brought me the things he knew I loved. If I saw a piece of clothing online, he would secretly buy it for me. When I craved chocolate or snacks, he went out and got them without hesitation.
The bond between the three of us was special.
We argued at times, as all siblings do, but we always found our way back to each other.
The news of their imprisonment shattered me.
In the dark
Mumin Thaher, left, and Hady Thaher, right. (Photo courtesy of the author)
We were devastated. We did not know why they had been taken or how long they would be held.
Our hopes faded even further when they were not released in the fragile January ceasefire exchange deal this year.
Months later, after the January ceasefire had collapsed, a neighbor from Jabaliya – Shaaban, who, it turned out, had been detained with my brothers in Ofer Prison – met my father by chance.
He reassured him that my brothers were in good health and keeping their morale high.
In early September, when Israel ordered all of northern Gaza to evacuate south, we relocated to Nuseirat.
Our devastation about my brothers dragged on until October when news of an upcoming ceasefire with a prisoner-exchange deal was announced.
As not all the Palestinian prisoners would be released, my family and I felt ambivalent – hopeful but anxious, afraid that my brothers might not be freed, just as had happened in January.
On 13 October, a list of the Palestinian prisoners to be released in the exchange deal was published in the early morning.
We searched through the list until we read the names of my brothers.
No words can describe our feelings, the happiness my family and I felt.
Tales of prisons
It was around 5 am when my father went to Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, where the prisoners were to arrive after being released.
My mother said she wanted to make up for my brothers every moment they endured in prison, so she went to Nuseirat market to buy them clothes and food while my father was waiting at the hospital.
After 11 hours of waiting, around 4 pm, Hady and Mumin finally arrived.
I envy my father for being the first person to hug them.
It took another six hours before my brothers came to Nuseirat, where we had been displaced.
My grandparents, my uncles and aunts, my brother’s friends and our neighbors in displacement were all waiting with my family and me for their arrival.
I broke down in tears and hugged them tightly. My mother did the same.
We spent the entire night talking.
My brothers told us that after they were seized at the Jabaliya checkpoint, they were first transferred to Sde Teiman military camp in the Negev desert.
During their six months in Sde Teiman, they were unable to sleep properly. It was only after they were moved to Ofer Prison in April 2025 that they were able to get some rest.
Conditions in Ofer were somewhat better, but still the prison was unsanitary. Both contracted scabies, and throughout their detention there, they were forced to put the same clothes back on after every shower.
In August 2025, they were moved to Al-Naqab Prison, where they remained until their release.
At Al-Naqab, my brothers said, the food was slightly better, hygiene conditions – showers and shaving – were regular, and beatings – though still frequent – were not constant.
Compared to Ofer and Sde Teiman, they described Al-Naqab as “heaven.” I could hardly imagine anyone calling a prison a heaven.
Along with general weakness, scabies and anemia, Mumin and Hady contracted several other illnesses during their imprisonment.
Mumin contracted eczema as well as a fungal infection. These conditions could have been treated with medicine, but prison guards repeatedly delayed or denied access to medication.
Mumin said the soldiers took pleasure in seeing prisoners suffer.
Hady still suffers from joint pain and a lingering problem with his left eye caused by severe beatings.
Punitive measures
Hady also had a tan complexion before, but after his release, his skin had turned pale.
Doctors at Nasser Medical Complex explained that this was due to poor nutrition and lack of sunlight.
Meals in prison were small: one slice of bread with jam, canned tuna, a slice of tomato, a boiled egg and a bit of cheese. My brothers said they never received meat, and vegetables only rarely.
Prisoners who tried to save leftover food were punished, my brothers said.
Punishments could include brutal beatings. Some detainees were being scalded with boiling water or burned with heated metal tools, although my brothers said they didn’t experience this themselves.
Prisoners were sometimes forced to stand all day with hands raised or remain handcuffed and blindfolded for long hours – or even days.
They were punished, my brothers said, for almost anything: raising their heads, looking at soldiers, changing positions or even laughing inside their cells.
Every few days, the soldiers would force prisoners out of their cells for a “crackdown session,” during which the prisoners were beaten mercilessly.
Hady was once beaten so badly that he could not move the left side of his head for two months, leaving him with his lasting problem in the left eye.
Prisoners were also subjected to frequent isolation, my brothers said. The total silence of isolation was then followed by being placed in rooms with deafening music blaring loudly from speakers – a torture method referred to as the “disco room.”
The soldiers would even tell prisoners that they had killed all their family members. That is why the first thing my brothers asked after their release was whether “we were all okay.”
No solace
Since October 2023, at least 98 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli custody. Some 3,368 remain in administrative detention, without charge or trial, not counting all detainees from Gaza, according to prisoner rights group Addameer.
My brothers weren’t classified as prisoners.
Every six months, they faced a mock trial, where a judge would label them “unlawful combatants,” a classification for Palestinians held pursuant to Israel’s Incarcerated Unlawful Combatants Law.
This law allows Israel to detain Palestinian detainees indefinitely without charge or trial, of whom 1,205 are still imprisoned as of November 2025.
My brother’s nightmare may have ended, though the psychological scars remain.
But they always ask us to pray for the thousands of prisoners still suffering in Israeli detention.
Asala Thaher is an English translation student and a writer based in Gaza.
