Shot Point-Blank: the latest assault on Marwan Barghouti
An Israeli prison guard shot Marwan Hasib Hussein Barghouti in the leg with a rubber bullet at point-blank range inside the prison. The round wounded him and left him bleeding.
The family learned of it only after their most recent visit, says his wife, the lawyer Fadwa Barghouti.
Barghouti, 66, is from the town of Kobar, northwest of Ramallah. The shooting adds to a pattern of assaults on his body and his morale that has not let up. It came as the occupation’s prison service issued a report inciting against him, and as the international campaign for his release kept growing.
Everything being done to him targets his standing and what he symbolizes for Palestinians, Fadwa says.
Drawing on figures from prisoners’ institutions, the Prisoners’ Media Office counts roughly seven brutal assaults on him since the war of October 7 began. They left him with broken ribs and multiple injuries. One, in September 2025, followed a raid on his cell by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who threatened him directly.
The Arab League’s General Secretariat, through its Palestine and Occupied Arab Territories Sector, has condemned the systematic, repeated assaults. Around two months ago, it says, a stun grenade was thrown into his cell and burned his hand, an attempt to harm him in body and mind.
The Arab League has called for a special international committee to investigate the repeated assaults on Barghouti, for an independent medical visit, and for his transfer to a hospital outside the prisons. It demands an end to every form of systematic torture against him and against other prisoners. And it demands his immediate release as a political prisoner.
The prison service is rattled by the official, popular, and international response to the campaign “Freedom for Marwan… Freedom for Palestine,” Fadwa says.
The report was meant to condemn him. Instead, she says, it is a measure of his reach, his influence, and how widely the world is now demanding his release.
“What the occupation failed to understand for a quarter of a century, and still does not understand today, is that Marwan has never once backed away from his conviction that freedom is a right, that the occupation will end, that resisting the occupation and seeking a just peace that ends it is a national and moral responsibility, and that incitement and assault will not tear him out of the hearts of his people or the conscience of the free people of the world,” she says.
Barghouti has been held in isolation at Ganot prison since November 2023, alongside a number of leaders of the prisoners’ movement, and has been moved between several isolation wings under tightening conditions. The occupation refused to release him in the Flood of the Free exchange deal, despite sustained international and human rights demands.
He was the first member of Fatah’s Central Committee and the first member of the Palestinian Legislative Council to receive a life sentence from the occupation. He is serving five life sentences plus 40 years. The sentence rests on claims that he was responsible for carrying out operations during the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
Barghouti was born in 1959. Israeli forces first arrested him in 1976 and detained him several times after that, then deported him from Palestine. He returned in 1994. He was later elected to Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, then became the movement’s secretary-general in the West Bank, and won a seat in the Legislative Council in 1996. Occupation forces arrested him again on April 15, 2002, held him through a long interrogation, tortured him, and put him in solitary confinement. An occupation court sentenced him to life in 2004.
Behind bars, he earned a doctorate in political science, wrote the book A Thousand Days in the Solitary Confinement Cell, and led the Dignity Strike in 2017.
