Khalida Jarrar

Khalida Jarrar was born in the city of Nablus on 9 February 1963. She is the daughter of Shaharat and Kanaan al-Ratrout. She has two brothers, Khalid and Tariq, and five sisters: Manal, Maha, Salam, Nihaya, and Reem.

She is married to Ghassan Jarrar, a businessman who works in furniture-making and children’s toys, and they have two daughters, Yafa and Suha. Ghassan Jarrar is a former political activist who has been held in administrative detention without trial many times; he has spent nearly ten years of his life in Israeli prisons.

Jarrar did her schooling in Nablus. She completed her primary education at Cordoba School, then went to junior high school at the Carmel School, did her first year of high school at the Fatimiyya School, and then attended and graduated from the A’ishiyya School. After that, she enrolled in the Faculty of Commerce at Birzeit University in 1980, majoring in Business Administration, where she obtained her bachelor’s degree in 1985; she earned a master’s degree in Democracy and Human Rights Studies in 2003.

Jarrar began to be politically active at a young age. She got involved in the Voluntary Work Committees that had expanded in the West Bank since the mid-1970s and was an active supporter of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. She was first arrested by the Israeli occupation forces on 8 March 1989, during the First Intifada, following her participation in a demonstration on International Women’s Day. Jarrar also served as director of the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association from 1994 to 2005. She then held the post of vice chair on Addameer’s board until 2017.

In 1998, Israel issued a travel ban on Jarrar after she took part in preparatory meetings for the UN’s Declaration on Human Rights Defenders in Paris. She was allowed to travel in 2010 to Jordan for medical treatment after being diagnosed with a cerebral infarction in her brain tissue caused by deep vein thrombosis. The relaxation of the ban came only after diplomatic pressure and prolonged legal proceedings.

In the January 2006 Palestinian Authority elections, Jarrar was elected as a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) ticket. She was responsible for the prisoners’ portfolio in the PLC and was a member of the Higher National Committee to follow up on Palestine’s quest for becoming a member state in the International Criminal Court.

On 20 August 2014, the Israeli authorities issued an order to deport Jarrar to Jericho for six months, restricting her movements to that area. However, she rejected it and staged a sit-in at the PLC headquarters in Ramallah, declaring, “I will not comply with this deportation order; it is my right to remain in my place of residence.” Other lawmakers from the various Palestinian factions, along with prominent political and human rights figures, supported her sit-in.

Jarrar was arrested again in Ramallah on 2 April 2015. After her arrest, she was taken to the Beit El settlement, to an Israeli army base near the village of Jaba’ east of Jerusalem, and then to the Ofer military prison camp near Ramallah, where she was interrogated nonstop for over four hours on charges of being “a member of a terrorist organization” and of having a leadership role in it. However, during that interrogation, she refused to cooperate with the occupation authorities’ intelligence agencies and maintained her right to remain silent, refusing to eat or drink anything. She was put in shackles and transferred to the Hasharon women’s prison in the north of Palestine.

After she was put on trial, Jarrar was sentenced to about fifteen months in prison. Her trial proceedings were attended by a large number of diplomats, lawyers specializing in international law, and international organizations. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and Amnesty International issued statements calling for her release. Eventually, she was released on 3 June 2016 at the Jbara checkpoint near the city of Tulkarm.

The occupation forces re-arrested her on 2 July 2017 from her home in al-Bireh. During the arrest, they assaulted her husband and daughter, ransacked the house, and confiscated personal possessions. She was sentenced by the military court in Ofer prison to six months of administrative detention. This administrative detention order was renewed three times, and during this time her father died. She was released from prison on 27 February 2019.

On 31 October 2019, Israeli forces raided Jarrar’s home and took her back to Ofer once again, where she was again interrogated. She was then transported to Hasharon Prison under tough conditions and later transferred again to Damoun Prison, located south of Haifa. On 1 March 2021, the Ofer military tribunal sentenced her to 24 months of actual prison time, with an additional sentence of 12 months to remain suspended for five years from the date of her release, along with a fine of 4,000 shekels. She was charged with being a leading member of “a banned organization” (the PFLP).

On 11 July 2021, Suha Jarrar, a human rights activist and Khalida Jarrar’s younger daughter, died from a heart attack at the age of 31. Despite urgent appeals by the Addameer association for Jarrar’s immediate release so that she could attend her daughter’s funeral, the Israeli Prison Service denied her that right. Omar Shakir, director of Human Rights Watch’s office for Israel and the Palestinian Territories, condemned the Israeli decision: “The Israeli authorities should have at least allowed her to say goodbye.” Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank attended Suha Jarrar’s funeral, with the crowd chanting en masse “O Jarrar, we are all your daughters.”

After spending nearly two years in prison, Jarrar was released on 26 September 2021. She went directly to her daughter’s grave. In an interview with the TV channel al-Mayadeen just four days after her release, Jarrar said, “I have come out of prison after losing my beloved daughter, Suha, so my emotions have been mixed and complex.” She said that “to lose anyone while in captivity is an extremely difficult experience, and for the occupation to deny me bidding farewell to my daughter has perhaps been one of the hardest moments in my life.” Jarrar then made a pledge to her late daughter that she would “continue to do everything she had dreamed of,” noting that Suha “was born when her own father was in prison and she passed away while I myself was in prison.” When asked about her plans for the immediate future, Jarrar said, “I will carry on my path until my people—and all peoples of the world—have achieved freedom from colonial domination, be it Palestine that is under Israeli occupation, or the rest of the world controlled by US imperial hegemony.” She added, “I have been touched by the warmth, love, and the yearning for freedom from my people, people in the rest of the Arab world, and people all over the world. The occupation can imprison everything and anything except these feelings.”

After her release, Jarrar worked as a pro bono researcher at the Birzeit University-affiliated Muwatin [Citizen] Institute for Democracy and Human Rights. At the beginning of December 2023, she published a research paper titled “Violations Against Palestinian Male and Female Prisoners During Israel’s War of Genocide,” published by the Independent Commission for Human Rights.

After Israel launched its devastating war on the Gaza Strip on 8 October 2023, the Israel Occupation Forces carried out a massive crackdown in the West Bank, during which they re-arrested Jarrar on 26 December 2023 and took her back to Damoun Prison, where she was again placed under administrative detention. In August 2024, she was transferred to the Neve Tirtza women’s prison in al-Ramle, where she was held in solitary confinement in a tiny cell that measured two meters in length and 1.5 meters in width, without any openings for ventilation. When she asked an Israeli intelligence officer why she had been placed in solitary confinement, the officer simply replied, “You will not know the reason for your solitary confinement, nor how long it will last.” Jarrar described in detail the harsh conditions of her solitary confinement in a letter relayed by her lawyer, written after sixteen days of isolation:

The cell has a toilet with a small window above it, which was sealed the day after I was moved here. They have left me with no air to breathe. Even the so-called slits/openings in the prison cell’s door have been sealed shut. There is only a small opening [under the cell door] which I sit next to most of the time to be able to breathe. I am suffocating in my cell, waiting for the hours to pass and hoping to find a few molecules of oxygen I can breathe to remain alive. What has made my solitary confinement even worse has been the extreme heat; I am, for all purposes, inside an oven ṣet at the maximum temperature. I cannot sleep due to the unbearably high temperature.

She also expressed her belief that the decision to put her in solitary confinement “was a political decision and an act of retaliation,” as she was moved to the solitary cell just a few days after the visit of Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s so-called “Minister of National Security,” to Damoun Prison. Comparing the conditions of women prisoners after 7 October 2023 to her previous periods of imprisonment, Jarrar thought that “the conditions in prisons after the beginning of the Gaza war are the toughest that female and male prisoners have had to face since 1967.” Despite this, she was determined to continue to resist: “Resisting solitary confinement is extremely difficult, but my determination to survive in a way that maintains my mental equilibrium is what has allowed me to hold in these harsh circumstances.”

Jarrar was released on the evening of 19 January 2025 as part of the prisoner-hostage exchange deal between Israel and Hamas. The hardship of solitary confinement was apparent when she was set free; she looked emaciated, her hair had turned white, and she barely had the strength to walk. “I was shut inside a grave,” she said.

Khalida Jarrar is one of the most prominent icons in contemporary Palestinian politics and society. She enjoys great popularity on the Palestinian street and especially among female prisoners, with whom she worked as a teacher and counsellor in prison. Israel had charged her with being a member of the political leadership of the PFLP, which prompted the anti-occupation Israeli journalist Gideon Levy to refer to her as “the Palestinian political Prisoner Number One.” Regarding her most recent arrest, Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz: “The calamities that Khalida Jarrar has had to endure one after another are unimaginable, and she has remained steadfast in the face of them all with remarkable courage, at least as seen from the outside. The truth is that she has never been actually convicted of anything, with the exception of one single charge: a political offense, namely ‘being a member of an illegal organization,’ and not for any offense having to do with violence or terrorism. Yet in spite of this, she is now under arrest once again, for the fifth time in her life and the fourth time since 2015, without Israel presenting even the slightest shred of evidence against her.” As Levy writes, “Jarrar is an opponent of the regime, the [Israeli] occupation regime, and as a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, she is supposed to have parliamentary immunity in the first place. She is a prisoner of conscience in Israel... If we want to talk about Israel as a democratic state, it is our obligation and our duty to remind everyone of Khalida Jarrar.”

Selected Writings

“Foreword” and “The Cohort of Defiance.” In Ramzy Baroud, ed. These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons. Atlanta, GA : Clarity Press, 2019.

Violations against Male and Female Prisoners during Israel's War of Genocide on Gaza. Ramallah: Independent Commission for Human Rights, December 2023.

“Freedom is Coming: Shattering Slavery and Emptying Prisons.” Jadaliyya (2024).

https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/45699

Sources

Levy, Gideon. “For a Bit of Air, the Palestinian Lawmaker Lies Down on the Floor, by the Crack Under the Cell Door.” Haaretz, 30 August 2024.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/twilight-zone/2024-08-30/ty-article-...

جرار، خالدة، "الحرية المقبلة: تحطيم العبودية وتبييض السجون"، "مجلة الدراسات الفلسطينية، العدد 137، شتاء 2024.

"خالدة جرار تتحدث للجزيرة نت عن معاناتها في العزل الانفرادي"، "الجزيرة نت"، 21 كانون الثاني/ يناير 2025.

https://www.aljazeera.net/politics/2025/1/21/خالدة-جرار-للجزيرة-نت-مقاومة-العزل

"خالدة جرار: تعرضنا للضرب وإسرائيل لا تعامل الأسرى كبشر"، "الجزيرة نت"، 21 كانون الثاني/ يناير 2025.

https://www.aljazeera.net/news/2025/1/21/خالدة-جرار-تعرضنا-للضرب-وإسرائيل-لا

"خالدة جرار للميادين: سأكمل طريقي إلى أن تتحقق حرية شعبي وكل شعوب العالم"، "الميادين نت"، 30 أيلول/سبتمبر 2021.

https://www.almayadeen.net/news/politics/خالدة-جرار-للميادين:-سأكمل-طريقي-إلى-أن-تتحقق-حرية-شعبي-وكل

"خالدة جرار"، "مؤسسة الضمير لرعاية الأسير وحقوق الإنسان"، 26 أيلول/ سبتمبر 2021.

 https://www.addameer.org/ar/prisoner/1843

"خالدة جرار: نضال سياسي في معتقلات الاحتلال"، "القدس العربي"، 19 كانون الثاني/ يناير 2025.

https://www.alquds.co.uk/خالدة-جرار-نضال-سياسي-في-معتقلات-الاح