Behind every prisoner, there's a family living in a parallel prison. Mothers who open their doors to long absences, fathers who hide their tears in silence, and children who grow up with a picture hanging in the living room. The testimonies of prisoners' families are not just fleeting stories; they represent the faces of Palestinian waiting, with all its pain and dignity. They are the silent pain of the homeland.

In their voices, you hear the trembling of longing, and in their eyes, you see the solidity of mountains. Every visit to prison turns into the journey of a lifetime, and every news of a prison exchange deal becomes a thread of hope that they cling to like a drowning man grasps a lifeline. Yet, they remain steadfast, turning their patience into a bridge spanning the distance between their prison cell and freedom.

In some stories, survival becomes a wound heavier than death itself. Thus, Khaled, the brother of prisoner Ibrahim Zubeida, embarks on a journey of survival he did not choose, after losing his mother, sisters, and his entire family in Gaza. His body lives on, but his soul hangs there, as names are erased from the records as if they never existed.

My mother told me: Get out... one person from the family must remain alive. I listened to her and left Gaza, but today I regret every breath I took away from her. I regret the day I left, because every day after it became black in my life, Khaled says before completing: I am here in Egypt, living in exile without roots, and I don’t know anything about my brother Ibrahim. Alive? Dead? I have no news. All I know is that he is in Israeli prisons, suffering the most severe types of torture. My brother is fighting alone there, and I am here living alone. And only a week ago, I received the news that ended my last hope: My entire family’s names were erased from the civil records in Gaza... as if they never lived, and as if I am the only remaining stranger. Imagine that the entire family becomes a erased memory, and you are left burdened with your helplessness and your survival that has become a curse.

Khaled Zubaida was unable to complete our interview, as he began to cry hysterically. I concluded the interview with him over the phone with the words of the late Fouad Haddad: I cried, I wiped my tears... By wiping my tears, I cried.

.....

Ahmad Khdeirat... He was martyred in prison, and his body is still held captive. When the occupation kidnaps a twenty-year-old Zahra, it leaves behind a broken home and hearts hanging on the walls of absence.

Ahmed Khdeirat, from the city of Dhahiriya in the West Bank, had known nothing in his life but a long struggle with diabetes since he was three years old. But he suddenly found himself embroiled in an even more violent struggle inside the occupation's prisons, without medication or mercy, until his last voice faded between the walls of his cell.

His mother, Hanan, and father, Hatem, were visiting Egypt to check on their daughter, Celine, who had passed her high school exams this year and was now enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine at Alexandria University.

There in Alexandria, they were reassured about the beginning of their journey, before leaving for Jordan, where they received the news that ended all their reassurance. The Israeli liaison office contacted them coldly to inform them that Ahmed had died.

The mother collapsed upon hearing this, and didn't know how she crossed the border from Jordan to the West Bank. Hours later, she found herself in Dhahiriya, in front of her house, which had become a mourning house. From there, she and her husband went to the Israeli liaison office, where they were forced to sign papers stipulating an autopsy of her son's body, despite their refusal. They were then informed that the body would not be returned to them. From that moment, Ahmed Khdeirat became a new number in the cemetery of numbers, a body deprived of the right to farewell and burial, after his medicine and life were taken from him.

Hatem Khudairat, the grieving father, said in a voice heavy with grief: “My son asked for insulin to live, and their response was more torture. They let him bleed sugar from his body until he wasted away, showing no mercy for his youth or his illness. Now they tell me he’s dead, but I say: Ahmed didn’t die. The occupation killed him slowly, and the world watched and didn’t move.”

Hanan weeps with the anguish of a mother who was robbed of her last glimpse of her son: His body was melting away every day, and I waited for a reassuring call, and then the call came to kill me with him. They didn't even give me the right to bury him, or say goodbye, or touch his last forehead. My son is a martyr, a witness to the criminal occupation.

Ahmad Khdeirat's story is not just the story of a prisoner, but a documented crime of neglect and torture, a murder whose effects extend to every Palestinian mother awaiting a child who may never return.

The stories are beyond imaginable cruelty, and among them comes the voice of the freed prisoner, Sufyan Salah, carried on one leg, but steadfast in his steps towards freedom, narrating his story as if it were a wound open to the world. In a steady voice devoid of any brokenness, Sufyan speaks: They arrested me brutally. They left no part of my body unbeaten... kicking, batons, and their feet that dug their hatred into my flesh. But what took the lion's share of pain was my foot. It swelled and burned from the severity of the inflammation. They offered me no treatment, leaving me to bleed and my wound fester until it reached gangrene. When they had no choice but to kill me or amputate my foot, they took me to the hospital. On the way, they didn't spare me... They beat me brutally all over my body, as if they were taking revenge for my mere breath. In the operating room, I didn't choose anything; they told me: either amputation or death. I woke up with a missing body, but a complete soul. Sufyan...steadfast on the Palestinian path

Immediately after the operation, they didn't give me a moment to recover... They returned me to prison, my body bleeding and my soul thirsty. I asked for water to quench my thirst, so they poured thinner into my mouth instead. They wanted to quench my thirst with poison, but they didn't know that the will to live is unbreakable... They released me after they thought I would breathe my last... They threw me among the rubble and debris, so I ran on one foot searching for my family, half of which was lost, and my home, which no longer exists... I found my children, and now we live scattered among tents, or what remains of school roofs, or in hospital yards that have become rubble... No words can describe what we are living, or rather, what we are dying! We have become dead while alive.