Palestinian folk hero Zakaria Zubeidi released from prison in hostage exchange

Some years ago, Zakaria Zubeidi, 49, was asked why no one was making a play or feature film inspired by his life. “It wouldn’t be believable,” he replied. As of January 30, there was a new twist as he was released in the third prisoner-hostage swap as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal.

The collective excitement that greeted Zubeidi’s arrival in Ramallah reflects the extent of his mythical status among Palestinians, eager for heroes and hope. Zubeidi became something of a legend when he escaped from a maximum-security prison by digging a tunnel with a rusty spoon in 2021. It took the Israeli security services five days to find him. Now, free again, he begins a new chapter.

Zubeidi was born in 1976 in the Jenin refugee camp where the Israeli army is currently carrying out one of its biggest offensives of the past 20 years, dubbed Iron Wall. “People of the camp! Come out and see Zakaria!” a group chanted as they held him up above their heads.

But returning to Jenin looks difficult in the current circumstances. According to the Turkish news agency Anadolu, Israeli forces raided Zubeidi’s home in the Jenin camp a week before his release, handcuffing his 14-year-old son and forbidding the family to celebrate when he returns.

Fewer and fewer relatives await Zubeidi in Jenin. His father died when he was 17 and his mother, Samira, was shot by an Israeli gunman in 2002, during the Second Intifada, as was his brother Taha. In 2022, Israeli soldiers killed another of his brothers, Daoud, in a shootout. He arrived wounded at an Israeli hospital and was arrested before he died. The Israeli authorities still refuse to hand the body over to the family.

Just a few months ago, the Israeli army killed Zubeidi’s 21-year-old son Mohammad. The car he was traveling in was hit by a drone. On January 30, Zubeidi’s wife Alaa, 39, waited for his release on a plastic chair in Ramallah.

“With everything that has happened, anyone else would be broken. But you saw: he comes out making the victory sign and shouting ‘Free Palestine.’ He really deserves to be seen as a national hero,” Palestinian Authority (PA) commissioner for Palestinian prisoners, Qadura Fares, told EL PAÍS after his release.

Zubeidi has spent his life between Jenin, Ramallah and prison, back and forth since he was young. At the age of 13, he was wounded by Israeli fire while throwing stones at soldiers; at 15, he went to prison for the first time. He has bullet wounds on his body and scars on his face from a homemade explosive device that went off while he was putting it together.

But his mythical status was forged during the 2002 Israeli invasion of the Jenin camp, from which he managed to escape by jumping from house to house and hiding in the rubble left by the Israeli bulldozers. He does not keep count of the number of times he has escaped death.

With the images of Yasser Arafat faded on the walls of the West Bank, Arafat’s natural successor, Marwan Barghouti, imprisoned for life, and top Hamas leaders killed in the 15 months of bombing in Gaza, Zubeidi is the closest thing to a living icon in a community desperately in need of one.

This is obvious from his reception in Ramallah on January 30. A mass of people crowded around him, desperate to get as close as possible to him so they could film him with their cell phones.

Chants

Zubeidi once led the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, historically the armed wing of Fatah but now participating in Hamas’s struggle with Israel. In any case, the crowd chants Hamas slogans, such as “What is our party? Hamas!” and “The people want the Brigades!” The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades has, after all, been instrumental in forcing the prisoners’ release by taking Israeli hostages in the October 7 attacks. The Islamist movement confirmed for the first time on January 30 that its military leader, Mohamed Deif, was killed six months ago in an Israeli bombing in Gaza. The news spreads like wildfire and a group breaks into cries of: “We are your men, Mohamed Deif!”

Amid a forest of microphones, Zubeidi told the crowd: “The message of our Palestinian people is clear: we have sacrificed many martyrs, and freedom comes with the end of the occupation and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”

Although thin and weathered, Zubeidi still has the boyish looks that attracted the world’s attention during the Second Intifada (2000-2005). Such is his appeal, he appeared in one of the best documentaries made so far about the Middle East: The Sons of Arna (2004). It is the story of the famous Freedom Theater, founded in the 1980s by Arna Mer Jamis, an anti-Zionist Israeli Jew who married a Palestinian and embraced the Palestinian cause.

The theater became Zubeidi’s tool of resistance to the Israeli occupation, but also one through which children could channel their anger. All its actors ended up dead or taking up arms; and the director of the project, Juliano Mer Jamis, was assassinated in 2011 by hooded men, in an unsolved crime that the Palestinians have swept under the carpet.

Zubeidi acknowledged that he planned an attack in which six civilians were killed in the city of Beit Shean in 2002 and subsequently benefited from an Israeli amnesty in 2007, in exchange for giving up his weapons, although he never formally surrendered them: he distrusted the pardon and feared for his life.

In 2008, Zubeidi focused on the Freedom Theater, becoming its director and renouncing violence. He has always maintained a balance between defending the legitimacy of political violence and criticizing it as a strategy, as he did in some of his plays.

Hunger strike

In 2011, Israel revoked his pardon without offering an explanation. A year later, the Palestinian Authority arrested him, following a shootout outside the house of the governor of Jenin. He went on hunger strike for months, which eventually led to his release.

In a further plot twist, he went on to work in the PA’s Prisoners’ Affairs Department — the same department that had imprisoned him: and he started to study political science at Birzeit University near Ramallah. His final paper, entitled The Hunter and the Dragon, explored his relationship with Israel. “I don’t miss the weapons, but I miss the Intifada,” he confessed in an interview at the time.

Zubeidi then maintained a low profile until 2019, when Israel re-arrested him for alleged connections to shooting attacks close to the Israeli settlement of Beit El in the West Bank that left no serious injuries. He was never formally convicted but was sent to prison. Israeli courts later sentenced him to five years for his role in the 2021 prison break, two years into his sentence for Beit El.

As in every action-packed life, there are rumors of an impossible romance involving Tali Fahima, an Israeli who voted Likud, the party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but, in 2003, began visiting Jenin regularly to try to understand why Palestinians were bombing buses and cafés in Israel. It was there that she befriended Zubeidi. Some believe they began a relationship — something both have denied.

Israel’s secret services went after Fahima, who ended up spending 30 months in prison for entering West Bank towns in Area A, which Israelis are forbidden to do. She was charged with “meeting with an enemy agent” and translating a military document. Fahima converted to Islam and accused Zubeidi of having collaborated with Israeli intelligence services in exchange for being allowed to travel from Jenin to Ramallah for a medical eye operation.

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