Marwan Barghouti has been in occupation prisons for 22 years (Reuters)

As the prisoner release negotiations progressed, the name of the leader of the Fatah movement, Marwan Barghouti, emerged, whom the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) is demanding for his release after 22 years he spent in Israeli prisons.

Some Palestinians see in Barghouti the person capable of reuniting them, while others are a card that Hamas needs to repel international pressure after the end of the aggression, as stated in a lengthy report by the Spanish newspaper El Pais about the Fatah leader, written by its correspondent in Ramallah, Luis de Vega.

Will Israel release Marwan Barghouti?

From her home in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, his wife, Fadwa, suffices with one sentence: “I am optimistic.”

The head of the Hamas political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, personally demanded the release of the “most famous Palestinian prisoner,” even as he belongs to a rival faction of Hamas.

Man of reconciliation

Many Palestinians see Barghouti - who was sentenced to five life sentences on charges of "terrorism" - Nelson Mandela as a Palestinian who can unite secularists and Islamists among them, at a time when the Palestinian issue is going through its most delicate stages.

This is what made Israel impose solitary confinement on him several times in the past three months, and move him between several prisons created by “Megiddo,” according to the information available to the family.

Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir accused Barghouti of planning riots from behind bars. He tweeted in mid-February, saying, “We transferred the major killer Marwan Barghouti from Ofer prison to solitary confinement, due to information about his planning unrest,” but Barghouti’s younger son denies that.

Arab (33 years old), the youngest of Barghouti's four sons, says, with a large picture of his father and Mandela behind him, that his father is in a cell where the bright light shines on him all the time, the loudspeakers are blaring at full volume, and he is restricted from water, food, and even clothes and toiletries.

Arab has not seen his father for 22 years, his wife has not visited him for a whole year, and even the lawyer only met him for a very short period at the end of last January.

The family clings to the thread of hope, even if “the priority is to stop the war of extermination in Gaza and release all political prisoners, not just my father,” Arab says.

Among those who met Barghouti in prison was Abdul Qader Badawi, who was a teenager when he was imprisoned for 7 years because of his participation in confronting the occupation in the streets of the West Bank.

“He left a great impact on me. He is a human being, a teacher, and a friend... He is an ocean of generosity,” Badawi says from his office at the Palestinian Center for Israeli Studies (Madar) in the West Bank, before recalling a photo of him with Barghouti taken in prison 7 years ago.

Badawi sees in Barghouti the man who can lead a national unity government, and he recalls how he used to stress the necessity of organization when they met, advice that made him seek educational attainment in order to obtain, while in prison, a Tawjihi certificate and a bachelor’s degree.

Barghouti is president

Despite the popularity of Hamas, which has been rising at the expense of the Fatah movement since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa flood on October 7, Barghouti is still the candidate to win in any potential presidential vote, whether the competitor is Haniyeh or Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, according to the latest poll by the Palestinian Center for Political Research. And the anointed one.

“The time has come to organize presidential elections after two full decades without voting, so that the Palestinians can choose whomever they accept as a leader,” says son Arab, who confirms his confidence in his father’s ability to unite the Palestinians and fight corruption and occupation, but he is not confident that he will run in the presidential race, unlike in 2021, when he submitted to the ballot, which was not organized. in the end.

Hamas seems keen to put Barghouti at the heart of the prisoner negotiations.

“If the matter was left to Israel, he would not leave prison, but let us see how the negotiations go, and how Hamas plays its cards,” says Abdel Fattah Dawla, a Fatah leader who got to know Barghouti in the Israeli prisons where he stayed from 2006 to 2011.

As for Haifa Qudsiyeh (68 years old), a leader in Fatah, she sees Barghouti as “the only way out available to Hamas,” but she fears that Israel will deport him abroad after his release.

Political analyst and writer Sari Orabi - who spent 8 years in occupation prisons and also in Palestinian Authority prisons due to his affiliation with Hamas - says that the movement needs Barghouti to repel international pressure on it.

He added, "Hamas knows that it will be difficult for it to return to ruling Gaza and rebuild it after the war, so Barghouti will be useful then."

Orabi accuses the senior leaders in Fatah of restricting his supporters in the 2021 elections, which were not held in the end. He also accuses the movement of obstructing the release of Barghouti in the 2011 deal, in which Yahya Sinwar, Israel’s most wanted man, left prison, and whom it considers the mastermind of the most powerful attack against it since its establishment.

A different opinion

But Nashat al-Aqtash, a professor of media at Birzeit University, who participated in organizing Hamas’ election campaign in 2006, does not see Barghouti as the solution, even if that is the opinion of many.

Al-Aqtash believes that the Fatah leader has many supporters among the new generation of Fatah, not among the old generation, so he insists that despite the opinion polls, and despite the war and international pressure on the Islamists, Barghouti will not be able to defeat the Hamas candidate if presidential elections are held.

Source: Spanish press