Aya Fuqha: An Engineer and Business Owner, Now in Isolation at Damon Prison
Aya Hatem Fuqha, a 34-year-old engineer from Kafr al-Labad, east of Tulkarem, is being held in isolation at Damon prison with two other women. Starvation has left her gaunt and visibly thinner. She is the third daughter in her family to be taken.
Israeli forces stopped her at a flying checkpoint and arrested her on February 26, 2026.
Her case is still before the courts, and the hearings keep coming. Her family told the Prisoners’ Media Office that another session is set for August. No one has given them a reason for keeping her in prison. News reaches them through her lawyer, or from women released from Damon.
The occupation had already taken two of her sisters from the family home. Baraa Fuqha spent five months and 10 days behind bars before her release in the Toufan al-Ahrar exchange. Alaa Fuqha was freed after two months, and only after her family paid a steep bail. Her sisters are waiting for her now. They know exactly what she is living through.
Conditions inside Damon have not eased, her family says. The guards continue to abuse the women. The administration enforces a starvation policy and withholds even basic necessities.
Aya is serving a punishment nobody has explained. The Prisoners’ Media Office says the Damon administration isolates three women at a time, on and off, for stretches of varying length. The method is new. Aya’s family learned through released prisoners that she has been held this way for some time.
She has managed to get word out that she is fine and her morale is holding.
The state of emergency inside the prisons is still in force. Visits are banned, and relatives have no way of seeing the women for themselves.
Aya made her own way. She trained as an engineer and built a food business to support the women around her. She was busy with her own plans and with her community until she was shut inside an isolation cell at Damon, cut off from her work and her future.
Soldiers have knocked on this door before. Night raids are routine across the West Bank, and families learn to live with them. The arrest of a daughter is different. She is taken from her family for no cause at all, because she is Palestinian. The names change. The waiting does not.
The case grinds on. Her family is waiting for the isolation to lift and for a lawyer’s visit that brings better news. Until then they pray for her release, in a house that has now sent three daughters into occupation prisons.
