When the Sentence Ends and Detention Does Not: The Case of Mahmoud Ahmad in Ramon Prison

Mahmoud Sami Mahmoud Ahmad was due to be freed on September 25, 2025. A year on, the occupation is still holding him in Ramon Prison.

The 38-year-old from Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip, is serving extra days that were never part of his sentence. He wants to know why he hasn’t been freed now that his sentence is over. His wife and children have been asking the same question for a full year.

No answer has come.

Occupation forces arrested Mahmoud on November 29, 2021, as he passed through the Hanoun crossing. After years of waiting, his release date arrived. The occupation did not honor it.

About five years into his detention, the occupation has sent the family back to square one. It referred Mahmoud to the “secret file.” It also renewed his administrative detention three times, although his original sentence was over.

His family described their ordeal, the circumstances of his arrest, and his worsening health to the Prisoners’ Media Office, and used the office to issue an urgent appeal to the relevant bodies.

“Today it has been a full year since Mahmoud’s sentence ended, and the occupation is still holding him,” the family says. “His return has been delayed by an extra year, and we’re still following whatever news of him we can.”

For the family, the past year of anxiety and waiting has been harder to bear than all the years of detention before it. Since the release date passed, there has been no end in sight. Their fears keep growing: for his life, his health, and the conditions of his detention.

Conditions in Ramon are harsh, the family says. Mahmoud gets far too little food, and what he does get is poor. He is denied basic necessities and suffers medical neglect. Prison authorities keep him in isolation, impose constant restrictions, and mistreat him. They bar his family from visiting and obstruct visits from his lawyers.

The latest word to reach the family is that Mahmoud is still in Ramon, where living and health conditions keep getting worse for him and for the other prisoners.

“Mahmoud’s situation has become a constant worry for us, especially since he was supposed to be released a year ago,” the family says. “Now we know his health is getting worse. He’s also suffering from a psychological condition he never had before, because he’s been cut off from us, he’s always afraid for us with the war going on, and he worries that something bad has happened to us.”

His wife made a humanitarian appeal through the office.

“I am the wife of prisoner Mahmoud Ahmad, and I write these words carrying in my heart the pain of five years of absence, waiting, and fear. My husband has been a prisoner for five years, and we know nothing about him that could ease our hearts. We don’t know how he lives, how his health is now, or what he goes through inside the prison. All we have is waiting and prayer. Every day that passes without news of him adds to our fear and our pain.”

The children have grown up missing their father, she says. They ask about him constantly and dream of the day he comes home. “I don’t know how to explain to a child what it means for his father to be gone all these years,” she says, “or how to reassure him when I have no answer myself, and no peace in my own heart.”

She closed her appeal with one request.

“All I ask now is to know that my husband is well, and for news of him to reach us and put our hearts at ease. Five years of absence have made waiting part of our lives, but they haven’t made the pain any less. I appeal to every human rights and humanitarian body to intervene to learn his fate, check on his condition, and work for his release, so he can come home to his family and his children, who are still waiting for him every day.”