All photographs by Maen Hammad (2025) / Courtesy the artist.
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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.
