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| A Palestinian protester holds a placard in 2015 bearing a portrait of Nasser Abu Srour during a demonstration marking Palestinian Prisoner Day in the West Bank town of Bilin, near Ramallah. Photograph: Abbas Momani/AFP/Getty Images |
Tue 4 Nov 2025 02.00 EST
A celebrated Palestinian author who was freed last month after more than 32 years in Israeli prisons has said the use of torture increased dramatically during his last two years of captivity as Israel came to treat its jails as another front in the Gaza war.
Nasser Abu Srour, whose prison memoir has been translated into seven languages and is tipped to win a major international literary prize this month, was among more than 150 Palestinians serving life sentences who were freed as part of the US-brokered Gaza ceasefire and then immediately exiled to Egypt, where most remain in limbo.
Abu Srour, 56, recounted a sharp increase in the use of beatings and the deprivation of food and warmth after the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023.
“The prison guards uniform changed, with a tag on the chest written on it the word ‘fighters’, or ‘warriors’, and they started acting like they were in a war and this was another front, and they started beating, torturing, killing like warriors,” he said.
A UN commission listed 75 deaths of Palestinians in Israeli custody between 7 October 2023 and 31 August 2025... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/04/freed-palestinian-author-nasser-abu-srour-israel-prisons-gaza-war