Time: twelve noon .. Location: Room No. 9 in Section 3 of the Israeli Damon Prison. As for the event, it is a heavy hand blows on the door and a voice echoing “Anam Shawahnah Release.” When she heard her, she mumbled with her thin voice to her colleagues, “I want to sleep,” she did not believe Occupation.

Hours later, Ansam (23 years old) was at the Jalameh military checkpoint in the northern West Bank, breathing freedom and embracing her parents and fellow released female prisoners, at that time she realized that prison had become behind her and that 5 lean years had ended.

After calling her, Ansam came to meet us at her home in the village of Ematin, near the city of Qalqilya (the northern West Bank), her pictures and Palestinian flags were still hanging from the balcony of the house, and for about two hours she sat telling Al-Jazeera Net the story of families who had been drinking for long nights and days.

On March 9, 2016, Ansam returned to tell us the moment of her arrest when she tried to carry out a stabbing attack inside the Kedumim settlement near her village, where heavily armed soldiers surrounded her and beat her after they tied her and took off her clothes, and at first glance the news of her martyrdom spread as if it was certain.

Ansam Shawahna's house (Al Jazeera)

Monitor and violate

The captive girl lived - over the course of 17 days of moving between interrogation centers and 28 sessions of the trial - the colors of physical and psychological torment, especially in "Maabar" (deportations) in Hasharon Prison, as the female prisoners lose their complete privacy due to surveillance cameras and the guards' attacks, in real and outrageous terms. "I slept in my full hijab and clothes, and did not shower for many days," she says.

And there are about 40 prisoners in the occupation prisons, whose ages range between 19 and 60 years, and they are serving different sentences.

After 18 months of arrest, the court ruled her imprisonment for 5 years and the same suspended prison sentence she spent between the prisons of Sharon and Damon, where the prisoners suffer oppression represented by the denial of visitation, the withdrawal of equipment such as radios and electrical devices, or the reduction of the period of the break (rest), and the worst of it is isolation.

The bathroom .. Table tennis

As for illness, it is another torment. Treatment is only painkillers provided by the general prison doctor. Seeing a private doctor is like a miracle. When Ansam fell ill in February 2019, a private doctor saw her 6 months later and asked her for an X-ray, she was given 3 months later, and she received treatment in January. The second 2020.

With the spread of the Corona virus, the prison administration did not take any preventive measures related to the sterilization process, only providing them with two masks made of "prison uniform fabric."

A stand in solidarity with the isolated prisoner, Fadwa Hamadeh, at the Martyrs Roundabout in the center of Nablus (Al-Jazeera)

After 6 months, and specifically last September, the prisoners got two more medical-type masks, so they used one nose over a period of 6 months and postponed the second until release.

Refusing to do so, the prisoners sat in the prison yard for 12 hours, so the jailers closed the doors of the rooms and prevented them from entering, forcing them to set up a tennis table and turn it into a toilet after they put a blanket over it to cover themselves, as the prison is monitored with cameras.

These cameras lose the prisoners of privacy, so they go out with their headscarves to the yard to rest and are forbidden from exercising.

While bathing, they occupy 4 out of 8 bathrooms for fear of water being cut off. On top of that, they are located outside the rooms, with their doors transparent and exposed, and the captive lacks the most basic needs during the "menstrual cycle".

Inside the rooms, the prisoners find themselves shackled by the sudden incursions of the prisoners under the pretext of "number" and searches, "so we often sleep in our clothes, especially after the dawn prayers."

Truth turns into punishment and


adds insult to injury, because the female prisoners are counted 4 times a day and carried out by male jailers for "security reasons". There are two break-ins for the purpose of "Alsugrim", which is to knock on walls and floors to search for any attempt to escape.

The food provided by the prison authority is "not suitable for humans." The vegetables have spoilage and the chickens are "stinky" because they boil their feathers and the meat with their blood, and the same is the case with what they buy from the "canteen" (the prison store) because it is from the same source.

The canteen is another punishment for the prisoners as a result of its exorbitant prices and the doubling that depletes the prisoner who needs about $ 500 at a minimum, so the cheapest shoe reaches about $ 60, and the occupation is punished with the "canteen" by depriving them of it. She was crowned with her success by killing a large mouse the moment she reached the department, which was "also teeming with cockroaches."

A part of Ansam's work in prison, where female prisoners spend a large part of their time making embroidery and reading (Al-Jazeera)

Prisoners live as if they were in the "Stone Age" and they cannot pursue higher education due to the absence of teaching staff and their small numbers, so they go to educate themselves to read, but the occupation restricted them and allowed entry to novels only, and other books were banned under the pretext of incitement.

Mothers and defenseless

Hope is the food of the 11 female prisoners, and what they find most in the messages and pictures of their families, especially mothers, for they suffer regret to meet their children for years, such as the Gazan captive Nisreen Abu Kamil, the mother of 9 children, and Inas Asafra, the mother of two children and the wife of a prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment.

The biggest violation is the isolation of the female prisoners in dark cells in which they do not know the day from the night, as is the case for the two prisoners, Fada Hamada and Nawal Fatiha, who were isolated for several months.

It quoted them, "In isolation, the female prisoner absolutely loses her privacy due to the surveillance cameras of the cell, which is supervised by male jailers, and her hands and feet are tied when she goes out to the al-Furah Square."

Ansam attended a body among her family, but the soul is with her female captive companions, as she always thinks about them and the homing pigeon by transmitting their news to their families and vice versa through local radio, as the occupation prevents the visit, citing the Coronavirus.

She refuses to take off the prison watch and a beaded bracelet she made in the detention center and hovered around her thin wrist, and soon she will transfer her experience - in detention - to a book in which she writes the pain of the prisoners for what it is.