The Eight Who Outlasted Oslo: Four Decades of Captivity

Eight Palestinian prisoners held since before the 1993 Oslo Accords remain in Israeli jails. None has been included in any prisoner exchange deal. All eight are classified as veteran prisoners: six from the territories occupied in 1948, two from Jericho governorate. The oldest has been detained since 1986.

Since the occupation imposed emergency measures inside its prisons, released detainees have told the same story: the prisoners inside are dead. Not physically. But everything that sustained them has been taken.

Books, papers, and pens are gone. No radio. No television. No family visits. Decades of gains won by the prisoner movement have been stripped away. Lawyer access has been choked to almost nothing. The occupation keeps them alive, barely, and removes everything else.

All they have left is memory.

Before the emergency, prisoners killed time. Now time kills them. And eight names sit outside every deal, every release, every road home.

The Two Longest-Held Prisoners in the World

Ibrahim Abd al-Razzaq Ahmad Bayadsa has been locked up longer than any other prisoner in Israeli jails, and longer than any prisoner in the world.

Other prisoners call him “the walking library.” He is 66, from Baqa al-Gharbiyye in the occupied interior, and has spent four decades behind bars.

Born on March 7, 1960, Bayadsa was arrested on March 26, 1986. He is serving a 45-year sentence, with a scheduled release in 2031 under Israeli law. Five more years.

He once resisted by studying and following news from home. That is no longer possible. He now lives in near-total isolation from the outside world, cut off from his family entirely under the emergency regime imposed since the October 7 war.

In recent months, Bayadsa has lost significant weight, contracted scabies, and caught a stomach virus. Yet even now, stripped of every necessity, he draws on what he memorized over decades to help fellow prisoners get through the days. The walking library runs on memory alone now.

He spent seven years in solitary confinement. In those years, he memorized the entire Quran, mastered Hebrew and English, and enrolled at the Hebrew University to study political science.

Bayadsa is the last detained member of his cell, a comrade of the martyr prisoner Walid Daqqa and of the freed prisoners Ibrahim and Rushdi Abu Mukh. The occupation charged him with carrying out resistance operations inside the occupied interior and with membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

More than four decades in. Roughly five years to go. He holds on.