Zara Zhar

"Hind 335 bullets" This artwork is part of the HeART of Gaza traveling exhibition, a therapeutic arts initiative featuring drawings created by children and youth living in the Gaza Strip. Specifically, this piece is titled "Hind 335 bullets" and was created by Qamar Timraz and Misk Timraz (age 14/15). The drawing depicts a yellow car surrounded by IDF military tanks, reflecting the harrowing realities and trauma witnessed firsthand during the murder of Hind and her family in Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City

Two landscape paintings "Dayr Ammar" (2026) and "Bayt Lid" (2024) by Palestinian artist Nabil Anani. Born in Imwas, in 1943, and grew up in Halhul in the southern West Bank. He currently lives and works in Ramallah.

HASSAN SALAMEH: BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH Estimated reading time: 12 minutes Thirty years in Israeli prisons. Five thousand days in solitary confinement. A memoir smuggled beyond prison walls, and disturbing new revelations about an assault that has left Palestinian prisoner Hassan Salameh's life in danger. 📍3 November 2026 For thirty years, Palestinian prisoner Hassan Salameh has lived behind Israeli prison walls. More than thirteen of those years were spent in solitary confinement, in cells he described as graves for the living, where the distance between life and death seemed to grow smaller with each passing day. Now, at 55 years old, his life is once again in grave danger. On 3 November 2026, the Palestinian Prisoners' Club raised an urgent alarm following revelations that Salameh had been subjected to gunfire inside his isolation cell at Janut Prison on 15 September, the same day Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir entered his cell and threatened him with execution. According to testimony conveyed through his lawyer and his wife, Ghufran Zamel, Israeli prison personnel severely beat Salameh before Ben-Gvir's visit. Later that afternoon, guards returned, assaulted him again and fired nine shots at him. Ghufran says he suffered nine gunshot injuries. His lawyer has not yet been able to establish the ammunition type or the precise location and extent of those injuries. The Palestinian Prisoners' Club has confirmed receiving information about gunfire inside his cell, while Palestinian prisoners' organisations have condemned the incident as an attempted execution. It is a terrifying development, but to understand the man at the centre of this story, we must look beyond the latest assault and into the extraordinary testimony he has preserved throughout three decades of Israeli imprisonment. His story begins long before Janut Prison. 📍From Khan Younis to thirty years in captivity Hassan Abdul Rahman Salameh was born on 9 August 1971 in Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza. His family originally came from al-Khayma, a Palestinian village in the Ramla district, from which Palestinians were displaced during the Nakba of 1948. Like so many children born into refugee families, Hassan inherited the memory of a homeland his family had been forced to leave behind. He became politically active during the First Intifada and subsequently joined the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, working alongside figures including Mohammed Al-Deif and Yahya Ayyash. Following Israel's assassination of Ayyash in January 1996, Salameh became involved in organising a series of retaliatory attacks, including bombings. The operations became known within Hamas as the Holy Revenge. On 17 May 1996, Israeli forces captured him in Hebron after shooting and wounding him. According to Palestinian prisoners' organisations, he subsequently endured approximately four months of interrogation involving severe torture. In 1997, an Israeli court sentenced him to 48 life terms. He was only 24 when arrested. Thirty years later, he remains imprisoned, having spent more of his adult life behind bars than he ever lived outside them. Whatever sentence a prisoner is serving, no judicial ruling grants a state the right to torture, deliberately neglect, humiliate or threaten to execute someone in its custody. Yet the conditions described by Hassan Salameh reveal an existence in which even the most elementary aspects of human dignity have repeatedly been denied. 📍Five Thousand Days in the World of Barzakh In October 2022, a remarkable book began reaching Palestinian readers. Its title was Five Thousand Days in the World of Barzakh, the memoirs of Hassan Salameh, written during more than thirteen years of solitary confinement. The 224-page work was published by the Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies and Consultations in Beirut. Barzakh, in Islamic understanding, refers to the intermediate state between earthly life and the Hereafter. For Salameh, it became the closest description of the world into which he had been confined: neither fully living nor dead, but suspended somewhere between the two. In his memoir, he describes solitary confinement as an existence increasingly removed from ordinary life, a place where each passing moment draws the prisoner closer to what he calls the world of Barzakh. The book itself is an extraordinary achievement. It took years to write, and its pages had to be smuggled beyond prison walls in tiny, carefully folded bundles wrapped in plastic, known among Palestinian prisoners as capsules. These small packages were concealed and carried out piece by piece, until fragments of a life that Israel had attempted to isolate from the outside world could finally be assembled into a manuscript. Within its pages are accounts of hunger, illness, humiliation, loneliness and the psychological torment of prolonged isolation. But there is also humour, tenderness, faith and an astonishing determination to preserve the ordinary experiences that make us human. Salameh describes cells measuring approximately two metres by one, infested with insects and rodents. At first, he attempted to rid himself of the creatures sharing his confinement. Eventually, he reached an almost comical accommodation with what he jokingly regarded as the cell's original inhabitants. In another unforgettable passage, he recalls receiving half a slaughtered pigeon from a fellow prisoner. With nothing but salt to season it, he cooked and ate the bird, bones included. He remembered it as an exceptional occasion. Imagine the deprivation required for half a pigeon to become a feast. Such details tell us more about the realities of isolation than any prison statistic could. They reveal a world in which ordinary life has been reduced to its smallest fragments, and where the simplest pleasure can become a cherished memory. 📍The mother who told him to hold his head high One of the most powerful passages in Salameh's memoir concerns his mother, Khadija. During one of the rare occasions she was permitted to visit him, Israeli prison personnel brought her son into the visiting area with his hands restrained behind his back and his legs shackled. But Khadija refused to allow the sight of those restraints to break her spirit. She greeted him with affection and told him not to worry. If his captors were not afraid of him, she said, they would not have restrained him so heavily. Then came the words that stayed with him: “Stay steadfast, Hassan, and hold your head high.” In that moment, the mother became the one offering strength to her imprisoned son. Her words lifted his spirits, and years later he preserved them in his memoir. There is something profoundly moving about a Palestinian mother who, having already endured the dispossession of her people and the imprisonment of her child, could still find the strength to encourage him. Khadija died in March 2024. Hassan was denied the chance to embrace her one last time, to sit beside her in her final days or to attend her funeral. May she rest in peace. 📍A love that changed the meaning of the moon Perhaps the most unexpected chapter of Salameh's memoir is titled Isolation with the Taste of Love. It tells the story of Ghufran Zamel, a Palestinian woman who had herself experienced Israeli imprisonment and who chose to build a relationship with a man serving 48 life sentences. Their story began when Ghufran expressed her wish to marry Hassan. The message reached him through fellow Palestinian prisoner Ahlam Tamimi and a lawyer. At first, he refused. He knew that marriage to a man serving multiple life sentences would bring separation, uncertainty and profound hardship. He had previously married shortly before his arrest, but that marriage had ended because of his imprisonment. He did not wish to condemn another woman to the same existence. But Ghufran persisted. She wrote to him, explaining that she understood his circumstances and that her decision was neither impulsive nor made without consideration of the future. Eventually, Hassan agreed. He later recalled that her arrival transformed his experience of isolation. Other prisoners began noticing the change, observing that Hassan before Ghufran was not quite the same man as Hassan after Ghufran. And then came one of the most beautiful recollections in his memoir. Before their engagement, Hassan had paid little attention to the moon. Afterwards, he began sitting beside the narrow opening of his cell window at night, searching the sky for it. He would contemplate its beauty, sometimes awakening fellow prisoner Ahmad Sa'adat, secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, to share the moment. He began reading novels by Algerian author Ahlam Mosteghanemi, drawing inspiration from their language when writing letters to Ghufran. Love had changed the way he saw the world, even from inside a prison cell. The moon was no longer merely light in the darkness. It had become a reminder that even prison walls could not keep love from reaching him. Their marriage contract was formalised in 2010, yet Israeli prison authorities continued to prevent Ghufran from visiting him as his wife. Their marriage has survived largely through letters, photographs and messages carried between prison and the outside world. There have been no ordinary mornings together, no shared household, no simple privilege of sitting beside the person you love. And yet, across those years of separation, the relationship endured. 📍The prisoners' secret Facebook Salameh's memoir also reveals how prisoners devised ingenious methods of communicating with one another despite the restrictions imposed upon them. In Ayalon Prison, men held in neighbouring isolation cells discovered they could speak through small bathroom windows. They affectionately named this improvised communication system the prison section's Facebook. Through these openings, prisoners exchanged news, discussed politics, shared poetry and listened for messages from loved ones broadcast over Palestinian radio. On occasion, they even coordinated Friday prayers, despite being physically separated by the walls. Imagine men who could not see one another, sharing verses of poetry or news from Palestine through the smallest openings in their cells. These were not grand gestures. They were acts of ordinary human connection in an environment designed to deny precisely that. For Hassan, such moments interrupted the crushing silence of isolation and reminded him that he still belonged to a community beyond the walls. 📍What happened inside Janut Prison? On 15 September 2026, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir entered Hassan Salameh's isolation cell at Janut Prison. The footage he subsequently released showed the minister confronting Salameh and openly threatening him with execution. According to Ghufran Zamel, the video did not show the full confrontation. She says Hassan challenged Ben-Gvir directly, declaring: “I am Palestinian, and I have the right to defend my people and my land.” He went on to challenge the minister over Israel's actions in Gaza, accusing him of recognising Israeli suffering while refusing to acknowledge what Palestinians had endured. These words were conveyed through Ghufran following a lawyer's visit. They were not included in the published recording. According to her account, prison personnel had already beaten Hassan before the minister entered. At approximately four o'clock that afternoon, guards returned to the cell. They assaulted him again and fired nine shots at him. Ghufran says he sustained nine injuries and was denied adequate treatment. Three days later, he was taken for medical imaging, but she says he received little more than pain relief before being returned to isolation. On 2 November, a lawyer was finally able to visit him and convey the details of what had happened. The following day, the Palestinian Prisoners' Club issued an urgent warning, describing the escalating threats to Palestinian prisoners held in solitary confinement, particularly in Janut and Megiddo. The Prisoners' Committee of the National and Islamic Forces in Gaza condemned what happened to Salameh as an attempted execution and demanded urgent international intervention, including access to independent medical care. The exact nature of the ammunition and the full extent of his injuries remain unclear. But the testimony, the public threats made against him and the continuing denial of adequate independent medical examination raise profoundly serious questions about his safety. A prisoner, already restrained and entirely under the control of the authorities detaining him, must never be subjected to such treatment. 📍A life reduced to deprivation The September assault did not occur in isolation from the conditions Salameh had already been describing. In July 2026, correspondence from Janut Prison revealed the severe deprivation he was enduring. He described persistent hunger caused by drastically reduced food portions, prolonged gastrointestinal illness without proper medical investigation, inadequate dental care and continuing physical assaults during transfers and cell searches. He was permitted limited exercise in a confined space without proper sunlight. His eyesight had deteriorated to the point that he struggled to read the Qur'an because he lacked the spectacles he needed. For a man who had preserved his thoughts through literature, letters and religious study, even reading had become another struggle. In September, further testimony described an earlier transfer to Ramla hospital, where he said he had been beaten rather than given the medical attention he expected. These accounts reveal a pattern of deprivation and violence extending far beyond the latest incident. And they concern a man now in his mid-fifties, whose body has endured decades of imprisonment, prolonged isolation and torture. 📍The man behind the prison number When Ghufran finally saw the video released by Ben-Gvir in September, it was the first time in approximately three years that she had seen Hassan's face. She was shocked by his physical deterioration. The long years of imprisonment had left their marks. But there was something she recognised immediately. His eyes. The same familiar gaze she remembered from years before. As she reflected upon the footage, she spoke of the strength she still saw in him, despite everything he had endured. The same Hassan. There is something deeply affecting about that recognition, and about the pages of a memoir written under circumstances intended to separate a human being from the ordinary world. Five Thousand Days in the World of Barzakh is more than an account of prison conditions. It is a testimony to memory, loneliness, humour, faith, family, friendship and love. It tells of a mother who refused to lower her head before her son's captors. Of prisoners exchanging poetry through bathroom windows. Of half a pigeon becoming a cherished meal. Of a man who began searching for the moon because he had fallen in love. And now, thirty years after his arrest, that same man remains isolated inside an Israeli prison, while his family and Palestinian prisoners' organisations raise urgent fears for his life. His safety must be guaranteed. He must receive independent medical examination and treatment, and the circumstances of the shooting inside his cell must be thoroughly investigated. No prisoner should be beyond the protection of the law. No prison wall should conceal torture or shield those responsible from accountability. Beyond the walls of Janut Prison, Ghufran continues to wait. And somewhere within the pages of Five Thousand Days in the World of Barzakh, there remains the memory of a prisoner sitting beside a narrow window, looking for the moon. - Zara Zhar Based on Hassan Salameh's published memoir, Palestinian prisoners' organisations and Arabic-language reporting through 3 November 2026. 📍Recommended reading: Five Thousand Days in the World of Barzakh: Memoirs of Palestinian Prisoner Hassan Abdul Rahman Salameh in Solitary Confinement in Israeli Prisons (2022), published by Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies and Consultations.

ᡕᠵデ气亠

Another panel (No1) by artist/activist Jaime Scholnick's "GAZA: Mowing the Lawn" series which is comprised of 52 small panels documenting the 2014 assault by the Israeli military with airstrikes followed by a ground assault. The images that came across my newsfeed through social media were horrific. At first, I was angry at these postings and would pass them by. After 2 days I stopped and made myself look. I felt the need to document this latest atrocity on the part of the Israeli military. "Mowing the Lawn" is a term coined by the Israeli military to describe the periodic assaults they conduct in GAZA thus keeping the Palestinians under control. By covering these images with multiple lines and colors, the imagery becomes easier to look at, not less horrific. Israeli art critic and curator, Sagi Rafael, wrote, in an essay for the upcoming book of the same title: Jaime Scholnick’s “Gaza: Mowing the Lawn” may be one of the most significant politically charged artworks of recent years. Not only because of the direct reference to one of the world’s endless and violent ethnic and religious conflicts between the Israelis and Palestinians but because of its precise capture of the current Zeitgeist in the spirit of the era. It seems that we are at a high point in history, where we can know so much, yet prefer not to know as much, and easily turn a blind eye.