Prisoners’ movement under attack: Assault and transfer of Ahed Abu Ghoulmeh

Occupation forces inside the Zionist prisons have been continuing to attack Palestinian prisoners, including a number of leaders of the prisoners’ movement. The “Israeli” abuse, torture and mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners, including the ongoing denial of medical care, has already caused the martyrdom of over 65 Palestinian prisoners, only since 7 October 2023, amid the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine.

Ahed Abu Ghoulmeh, a member of the political bureau of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and head of its prison branch, was transferred from Ofer to Gilboa prison and beaten by Zionist prison guards, a situation revealed by Palestinians freed from Gilboa prison in recent days.

Ahed Abu Ghoulmeh and his wife Wafa’ have two children, Qais and Rita. He was born in 1968 in Beit Furik, near Nablus, and was elected as the head of the prison branch of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in June of 2022. He is serving a life sentence plus 5 years after being jailed by an occupation military court, for directing the assassination of the notoriously racist tourism minister of the occupation, Rehavam Ze’evi, in October 2001, in retaliation for the Israeli assassination of PFLP General Secretary Abu Ali Mustafa in August 2001. Abu Ghoulmeh was the leader of the PFLP’s military wing in the West Bank at the time.

As a high school student, he founded the Union of Secondary Student Committees in his village in 1982 and was first arrested in 1984 for organizing demonstrations to commemorate the anniversary of the PFLP’s launch. In 1986, he began to attend Bir Zeit University, but his education was repeatedly disrupted due to repeated arrests and detention. He was heavily involved in the great popular intifada, organizing popular committees and action groups in the Nablus area. After being arrested in 1990, he was transferred to administrative detention for a year. When he returned to university, he became a leader of the Progressive Student Action Front.

As a leader of the Popular Front throughout the 1990s, he was repeatedly pursued by the Israeli occupation, even as he completed his university degree, married and had two children. He was particularly active in defense of the Palestinian prisoners, representing the PFLP in the committee of National and Islamic Forces on prisoners and detainees.

He was repeatedly imprisoned and arrested by the Palestinian Authority under “security coordination” with Israeli occupation, in both January and December 1996, when he was jailed for five months, and again in May 2000. With the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, Abu Ghoulmeh played a leading role and he was publicly announced as a target for Israeli assassination in April 2001. After the assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa and the response of the PFLP in assassinating Ze’evi, he, along with Majdi Rimawi, Hamdi Qur’an and Basil al-Asmar — and then, PFLP General Secretary Ahmad Sa’adat — was imprisoned by the Palestinian Authority in Jericho prison in a security coordination agreement, where he was held under U.S., British, Canadian and Turkish guards.

During this time, Wafa’, his wife, was subjected to house arrest four times in a row for six month periods in an effort to prevent her and their children from visiting Abu Ghoulmeh in Jericho prison. On 13 March 2006, the occupation forces attacked Jericho prison after the withdrawal of the US and British guards, kidnapping Sa’adat, Abu Ghoulmeh, Qur’an, al-Asmar, Rimawi and fellow political prisoner Fouad al-Shoubaki. This attack was timed just weeks before Ismail Haniyeh and was to be sworn in as PA Prime Minister following the PLC elections, during which the victorious Change and Reform Party team (associated with Hamas) had pledged to release Sa’adat, Abu Ghoulmeh and all other PA political prisoners and end “security coordination” with the Zionist regime.

He was subjected to military interrogation for over two months, during which he was subjected to extensive physical and psychological torture as he refused to confess, and on 1 January 2008, he was sentenced by the occupation military court to a life sentence plus 5 years. He has remained a major leader of the prisoners’ movement and has been repeatedly subjected to isolation and solitary confinement, and his family have been banned on numerous occasions from visiting him. He was held in solitary confinement until 2012, when he and 19 fellow leaders of the prisoners’ movement, including Ahmad Sa’adat and Marwan Barghouti, were returned to the general population after the mass Karameh hunger strike.

His wife Wafa’ continued to be denied visits, and she saw him for the first time in 10 years in 2018. In June 2022, the PFLP announced that he had been elected the leader of its prison branch, following decades of his leadership. In May 2023, he was ordered to solitary confinement, and in February 2024, his mother, Sebtia, passed away, and he was denied the ability to bid farewell to her.

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network expresses our firm solidarity with Ahed Abu Ghoulmeh, a leader of the prisoners’ movement and a renowned example of resistance and steadfastness behind the bars of the occupation. We urge all supporters of Palestine to highlight Ahed Abu Ghoulmeh — and his fellow political prisoners — as we struggle to bring the Zionist-imperialist genocide in Gaza and throughout occupied Palestine to an end.