Spending more than 45 years in Israeli jails, Nael Barghouti became one of the most prominent figures of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement.
Nael Barghouti, the longest held Palestinian prisoner who spent 45 years in an Israeli jail, has been released and sent to Egypt.
The 67-year-old was released as part of the prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas. He arrived in Egypt on Thursday.
He spent four and a half decades behind bars, including 34 of them consecutively, making him the world's longest-serving political prisoner, according to the 2009 Guinness World Records.
Known among Palestinian prisoners as "Abu al-Nour", Barghouti was freed by Hamas in the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange and returned to live in his home town of Kobar, near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
Barghouti was first arrested in 1978 and sentenced to life imprisonment for resisting the Israeli occupation.
He has been subjected to the worst forms of torture behind bars and suffers from several ailments.
Barghouti, who hails from the village of Kobar in the occupied Ramallah, was even denied the right to attend his father’s funeral in 2004 by the Israeli authorities
His mother, Farha, a writer and poetess, kept waiting for her incarcerated son and died without seeing him the last time and without bidding him the last farewell.
Arrested for refusing to accept the illegal Israeli occupation and mustering the courage to resist it, Barghouti has spent 48 years in different Israeli jails.
In 2009, he broke the Guinness World Record for the world’s longest-serving political prisoner.
In 1978, a student activist, Barghouti, had to undergo a long and harsh interrogation. He was sentenced to 112 years in prison for allegedly killing an Israeli occupation officer north of occupied Ramallah.
His brother, Omar, and his cousin Fakhri were also arrested by the regime. Omar spent 26 years in prison before he was allowed to walk free but continued to be harassed.
Barghouthi’s only sister, Hanan, was 12 years old when he was arrested for the first time. Now she is a grandmother.
Barghouti was released in a prisoner exchange deal between the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli regime in 2011. After his release from jail, he married Iman Nafi, who herself had spent 10 years in different Israeli jails.
However, the freedom did not last long. In June 2014, the occupation authorities reneged on the terms of the exchange deal and re-arrested Barghouti. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison but after completing his term, they reinstated his original life plus 18 years sentence.
The hostage-prisoner swap which took place in the early hours of Thursday was the seventh and last in the first phase of the fragile truce between Israel and Hamas.
The deal took effect on January 19 and its first phase expires on Saturday.
The ceasefire consists of three phases, each lasting 42 days. In phase one, a total of 33 Israeli captives, including eight bodies, were released in exchange for some 1,900 Palestinian abductees held in the regime's jails.
