Fatima Mansour: One Year, Seven Children, No Goodbye 

Fatima Abd al-Fattah Mansour, a 41-year-old Islamic education teacher from Biddu, northwest of Jerusalem, walks free next Tuesday after a full year in Israeli detention. An Israeli court handed her a final one-year sentence in December 2025. Her seven children have counted every day since she was taken.

Mansour is one of 90 Palestinian women currently held in Israeli prisons. Twenty-four of them are mothers, women taken from their homes and children for no crime.

Israeli forces arrested her at her home on April 29, 2025. She had slept barely an hour that night, up late grading her students’ exams. Soldiers shut her daughters in a separate room so they could not say goodbye. None of the children saw her before she was taken.

That morning, the house went quiet. The woman who tracked every exam, every school routine, every small detail of her children’s days was gone.

Her eldest, Ansar, 21, and Samira, 19, are university students. Muhammad is 16, Siwar 12, and Filistin 11. Her two youngest needed her most: Golan, 5, and Wateen, just two and a half.

Wateen was still nursing. The family struggled to get her to take a bottle, to accept comfort from anyone other than her mother. Golan was about to start kindergarten. Fatima had wanted to brush her hair each morning, dress her in her school uniform, and walk her there herself. Those mornings went to someone else.

Their father became, overnight, the only parent to all seven.

Ansar and Samira, still young themselves, stepped into their mother’s place at home while keeping up with university. The harder share fell to Samira. She signed her marriage contract while Fatima was in prison. Her wedding is two months away. When Fatima comes home, she will have only those two months with her daughter before she sees her off as a bride.

Holidays came and went without Fatima’s cooking. The house lost the smell of the sweets her children always waited for. Ramadan passed without the worship schedules, the religious lessons, the rituals she had kept for her family every year.

Women released from Damon prison who served time with Fatima say she treated every inmate as her own child. She covered them on cold nights and looked after the youngest among them. Over those twelve months, she memorized the Quran.

Now she prepares to leave behind the women she shared everything with and return to her family. Her children are counting the hours.