‘I have denounced violence but I am going to continue the resistance by words’

Very good words from a former Hamas activist recently freed from Israeli prisons.

Taking dirt roads to avoid army checkpoints, Ahmed and another prisoner from Surif were carried home in a procession of cars flying green Islamic flags. There he saw the family’s new home for the first time: the old one was destroyed in 1997. “You look older than 23,” said an uncle, looking at his long beard and wrinkled brow.

“The hardest time was the first three months of interrogation,” Ahmed said. He told how his interrogators kept him tied to a chair for more than 20 hours a day, with a dirty sack on his head. “My teeth were chattering from the cold,” he said.

He and his brother were kept in separate prisons, and his family had not been allowed to see him since the start of the intifada in September 2000. He said the Israelis had confiscated prisoners’ table lamps, electric fans and mobile phones, adding that Palestinians in several Israeli prisons were planning a seven-day hunger strike in two weeks.

To which the Israelis probably wryly comment that it saves them seven-days rations. What a mess. . .