Photo Essay: Until Every Homecoming

For seven weeks between January and February 2025, I documented the weekly prisoner exchanges taking place in the occupied West Bank. These releases were part of the terms of the so-called “temporary ceasefire” announced on 19 January, after 470 days of genocide. 

During those weeks, our world watched in suspension — for once Palestine felt like it held still. The emptying of the prisons went from a chant to a physical manifestation; rendered possible by the armed struggle the imperial world promised us would bear no fruit.

Those weeks I photographed and recalibrated everything. Freedom fighters who were never meant to be freed — who had spent decades behind Israeli regime bars, deprived of almost everything — walked free. Back into the arms of their villages, their families, their homes: a husband relearning his wife’s face with a touch forbidden for years. A father hugging a daughter who had only ever known him as a photograph. Two brothers gripping each other, crying over a mother who died while one was inside. For those of us there, the grief and glory of it passed through us — sharpening the entire meaning of this struggle. A reckoning with the scale and gravity of loss, and of the violent, illegal carceral system that has been capturing our generations, for generations.

During those weeks, over 700 Palestinian political prisoners were liberated. Yet as I write this, thousands of new prisoners have been taken. Some of those freed have even been recaptured. Those who spent over a decade in Israel’s dungeons, who tasted freedom, are now arrested again. Political imprisonment is a heartbreak. It is our inevitability. Prisoners’ Day, for that reason, is our commemoration and condition.

More than a year after these images below were taken, what those weeks gave me was an understanding — from every embrace I photographed — of the daily weight of years of waiting, of absence, of carrying someone inside a prison.

I ask myself: do the thousands, tens of thousands, the more than one million since it all began — do they need me to write or photograph? To be a fly on the wall? For their faces to adorn the walls of every camp, city, and village?

Can they hear our songs and chants? Do they know we are still memorizing names and histories? That a ha-hi from a mother, a prayer from a father, a dream from a sister or a son, might still believe in the release — in the setting ablaze of al-Mascobiya, al-Naqab, Sde Teiman prison?

Do they know that their loved ones still want to make visits — that they would, if they could. To bring new clothes, cigarettes. A photo. To smuggle a Kit-Kat wrapper filled with a future son or a daughter. That their mother always asks anyone recently released: how is he? Is he healthy? What have they done to him?

Do they know we are still learning from them? From the university inside the cells. Taught from our professors — our prisoners — on the psychoanalysis of our enemy from within.

I hate cheap romanticization of our prisoners. Carrying their names but not their calls for unity, for action. The reality is they are systematically brutalized, tortured, raped, made to feel insignificant. Can we today remain devastated through them — metabolize that devastation, absorb it, and let it move us?

We are nothing without them. And so our prisoners need only one thing from us: everything. They need to be eating breakfast on the table they grew up on. Watching their children grow. Listening to a bird’s song. The homecomings we witnessed were a glimpse. The thousands more are still waiting for theirs.

Maen Hammad is a Palestinian documentary photographer, writer and researcher. See more of his work here.