He walked out of captivity carrying a kind of freedom that felt heavier than the walls he had left behind. By the time Ghassan Al-Atrash returned to his family, death had already rearranged the shape of his life. His father was gone, buried months earlier, and the reunion he had rehearsed in his mind dissolved the moment he realised he could not recognise his own child. Release did not restore what absence had taken; it merely exposed the scale of it.

Al-Atrash’s return to Jenin followed more than two years of administrative detention in a desert prison, one chapter in a longer cycle of imprisonment that predates the current genocidal war. The journey home was marked less by celebration than by a quiet disorientation. Faces gathered to welcome him, yet the one he sought was missing, and the years he had lost had widened into a gulf he could not cross. Freedom arrived incomplete, shadowed by grief and the knowledge that time had moved on without him.

The cost of captivity was written across his body. He emerged severely underweight, exhausted, and unwell, the result of sustained medical neglect. He spoke of depression, dizziness, intestinal illness and abnormal liver function, conditions that turned release into the beginning of another struggle, this time for recovery. The routines that anchor ordinary life had been stripped away inside: prayer times guessed by the sun, Ramadan marked by uncertainty, meals delivered in inadequate portions and at irregular hours, forcing prisoners to ration what little they had.

What he described was not an exception but a pattern. Conditions inside desert detention facilities have continued to deteriorate during the genocidal war, with shrinking food supplies, overcrowding and minimal hygiene materials. Weight loss and untreated illness are widespread, while administrative practices keep prisoners in prolonged uncertainty. Yet even within these confines, prisoners have tried to preserve a sense of purpose, turning religious observance into a form of endurance and dignity.

Al-Atrash’s story is ultimately about what freedom cannot fix. Leaving prison did not end confinement; it transformed it into mourning, ill health and the task of rebuilding bonds severed by years behind bars. His return stands as a reminder that liberation, when delayed and diminished, can arrive carrying its own kind of imprisonment.