Ahmad Sa’adat: Resistance Icon Buried Alive in Israeli Prisons
Ahmad Sa’adat, the 72-year-old Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has lost significant weight in solitary confinement at Megiddo Prison, where he spends 24 hours a day alone in a cell subjected to repeated raids by special units.
Sa’adat’s family, speaking to the Prisoners’ Media Office from their home in Al-Bireh near Ramallah, describes increasingly harsh conditions since October 7, 2023. “The treatment is extremely poor,” they report. “Our father has been subjected to physical assault multiple times as a form of retaliation.”
The veteran political leader has spent most of his adult life in Israeli custody. First arrested in 1969 after joining the Popular Front, Sa’adat endured multiple periods of detention—some administrative, others extending for years—before his election as the organization’s Secretary-General in 2001. Israeli forces seized him from Jericho Prison on March 14, 2006, where Palestinian authorities had held him since 2002. Two years later, an Israeli military court sentenced him to 30 years.
Last March, guards beat Sa’adat during his transfer from Ramon Prison to Megiddo. His family says he was shackled, blindfolded, and left in the prison yard for three hours before guards struck him on his back. The skin disease scabies, which he’d previously suffered from, has returned.
Prison authorities have issued special directives for prisoners they consider symbolically important to Palestinian resistance, part of what prisoner advocates describe as systematic retaliation aimed at weakening the prisoner community. Officials deliberately isolate influential prisoners to prevent unified resistance within facilities.
Sa’adat’s family struggles to maintain contact. Lawyer visits face constant obstacles. The elderly prisoner, who has undertaken repeated hunger strikes over the years to defend prisoners’ rights, remains excluded from prisoner exchange deals negotiated by resistance groups.
Since the October 7 attacks, aggressive policies have escalated against Sa’adat and other prisoners. International conventions guarantee basic rights to life, medical treatment, and dignity—protections that prisoner advocacy groups say Israeli authorities systematically violate.
The Prisoners’ Media Office continues documenting stories of long-term prisoners in solitary confinement, working to keep their cases alive in Palestinian collective memory as conditions deteriorate across Israeli detention facilities.
