Over the years of his imprisonment, and particularly in recent months, Marwan Barghouti, a senior Fatah official, has increasingly been mentioned as a potential future leader of the Palestinian leadership. This would follow the emergence of conditions that could allow for his early release from the Israeli prison where he is serving five consecutive life sentences plus another 40 years. The court that tried him ruled that Barghouti had led the terrorist cells of the Tanzim organization, which effectively served as Fatah’s military wing, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. He assisted them by providing funding and weapons, and in several cases even gave prior approval for terrorist attacks against Israeli targets. Alongside his conviction, Barghouti was acquitted of charges relating to the murder of 32 additional people. The judges explained their decision by arguing that Israeli law does not permit the conviction of an organization’s leader for acts carried out by its members, even when it is clear that the leader encourages such acts and provides his subordinates with general assistance, provided that this assistance is not intended to facilitate a specific criminal offense. It should be noted that Barghouti is serving his sentence in the security prisoners’ wing of Hadarim Prison.
In my view, despite having been behind bars for more than a generation, Barghouti is currently one of the key figures in the upper echelons of the Palestinian leadership, potentially if not yet in practice. The fact that he has spent more than two decades behind bars has strengthened the support and sympathy he enjoys in the West Bank. Comparisons between him and Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa and one of the figures most closely associated with the struggle against racial segregation, or apartheid, are frequently made in Palestinian public discourse. The nickname “the Palestinian Mandela” has become firmly established among the Palestinian public and in Palestinian media. In this context, it is worth noting that Barghouti’s lawyers invited Nelson Mandela to attend his trial as an observer, but Mandela made it clear that he would not accept the invitation or attend.
President Trump Comments on Barghouti
Particular attention should be paid to U.S. President Donald Trump’s remarks regarding Barghouti’s early release from prison. In an October 2025 interview with Time magazine, Trump described the matter as “a very significant issue” in response to a question about Barghouti’s possible release. The American president stopped short of committing himself to either supporting or opposing early release, but emphasized that “it’s on my desk” and that he was “considering it seriously.” Trump thus became the first American leader to publicly acknowledge that the possibility of Barghouti’s release had been discussed in discreet, high-level contacts between Israel and the U.S. administration.
A Murderer’s Résumé
In fact, Barghouti, who is now 67, was born on June 6, 1959, in the village of Kobar, northwest of Ramallah. He has been behind bars in an Israeli prison since his arrest on April 15, 2002, at the age of 43, in the al-Tira neighborhood of Ramallah during Operation Defensive Shield. On May 20, 2004, he was brought to trial in a highly unusual move before the Tel Aviv District Court rather than a military court, as is customary in cases involving Palestinians accused of carrying out terrorist acts.
Before his arrest, Barghouti was active in the Fatah movement, which he joined at the age of 15. In 1976, when he was just 17, he was arrested by Israel for the first time on suspicion of hostile activity. During his imprisonment, he learned Hebrew to a high level of proficiency. After his release, he was elected president of the Birzeit University Student Union. He was one of the leaders of the First Intifada, which erupted in December 1987, and led mass rallies against Israel in Judea and Samaria. During the uprising, Barghouti was arrested by Israel and deported to Jordan, where he lived for seven years until his return to the West Bank was approved under the Oslo Accords in 1994.
From Terrorist to Politician
Barghouti’s name has been raised as a candidate for Palestinian leadership several times since his arrest in 2002. The first time was in September–October of that year, just months after his arrest, when the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades mentioned him as a candidate for the position of Palestinian prime minister, arguing that his appointment would embarrass Israel. His name was raised again by the Tanzim in December 2004–January 2005 as a potential challenger to Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) in elections for president of the Palestinian Authority. Barghouti was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in the general elections held in the West Bank in January 1996 as part of the Oslo process.
In December 2005, Barghouti announced his departure from Fatah and the establishment of a new political party called the Future Party (Al-Mustaqbal). After reconsidering his decision, he withdrew from the initiative. In August 2009, he was elected to serve on Fatah’s Central Committee.
During his imprisonment in Israel, Barghouti used his public standing to promote various initiatives aimed at securing ceasefires with Israel and easing tensions between the two main power centers in the Palestinian arena, Fatah and Hamas. In 2003, he was involved in contacts with Hamas to advance an understanding with Fatah regarding a hudna (ceasefire). His associates also mediated between senior Fatah official Mohammed Dahlan and Arafat during the personal dispute that erupted between them in July 2004. In 2006, Barghouti initiated the Prisoners’ Document, which sought to promote Palestinian internal consensus following the escalation of tensions between Hamas and Fatah. In March 2012, just days before Land Day, he issued a statement from prison calling on the Palestinians to completely sever normalization relations with Israel, along with all other ties and coordination with it, boycott Israeli products, and advance Palestinian reconciliation.
On November 11, 2014, Barghouti published a letter from behind prison walls calling for continued resistance against Israel. The letter referred to “an ongoing armed confrontation, faithful to Arafat’s legacy, his ideas, and the principles for which thousands of martyrs have already died.” He added that “the Palestinian Authority must reconsider its rights and immediately end security cooperation with Israel, which only strengthens the occupation.”
Barghouti occasionally clashed with Arafat, and their relationship deteriorated further in the summer of 2000. When the Second Intifada erupted in September 2000, Barghouti led the Tanzim, which, as noted above, served as Fatah’s military wing and was responsible for numerous terrorist attacks against Israeli targets. The organization carried out suicide bombings under the name Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.
Secret Cookie Muncher
In April 2017, Barghouti initiated a hunger strike by security prisoners in Israeli prisons. After the strike began, the Israel Prison Service released a video showing Barghouti eating cookies. The footage made him an object of ridicule and derision on the Palestinian street. In response, his wife, Fadwa, claimed at a press conference that the video was fake. It should be noted that in 2001, Barghouti had managed to evade an Israeli attempt to carry out a targeted killing against him.
Since he began serving his sentence in an Israeli prison, Barghouti has enjoyed a considerable degree of sha‘biyya, meaning public support and popularity among Palestinians. This has been particularly attributable to his former closeness to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, for whom Barghouti served as a right-hand man and an operational arm on the ground in the confrontation with Israel. This role was reflected in his initiation of popular protest activities and his involvement in carrying out terrorist attacks through the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which operated under Fatah.
It is worth noting that during his current imprisonment, Barghouti completed his PhD at Cairo University. His doctoral dissertation examined the functioning of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
The Campaign to Free a Terrorist
Over the years that Barghouti has been serving his sentence in an Israeli prison, calls for his release have surfaced from time to time, voiced by activists within the Palestinian Authority. However, the impression is that these calls are largely demonstrative and symbolic, more a matter of rhetoric than a reflection of genuine interest or concrete intent. Among Palestinians aligned with Fatah, the Palestinian Authority has been criticized for “not going all the way” in making a firm and unequivocal demand that Israel release him early from the prison where he is serving his life sentences. Based on conversations I have held over the years, and particularly recently, with senior Palestinian Authority officials and rank-and-file Fatah activists in Ramallah on this issue, I have observed a cool and guarded attitude toward his early release. The reason is that such a move, if it ultimately materialized, could push members of the current Palestinian leadership out of positions of power and influence. These include figures and officeholders in the circle surrounding Abu Mazen, the president of the Palestinian Authority.
Hamas, too, has repeatedly called over the years for Barghouti’s release from prison. These calls have been intended to appease his supporters in the West Bank and portray the organization as working in the service of the Palestinian cause, rather than merely advancing its own particular interests. Like the Palestinian Authority, however, Hamas did not make an ultimatum-style demand for his release. This was evident during negotiations with Israel over the prisoner exchange deal signed in October 2011 concerning abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Under that agreement, Israel released 1,027 Palestinian security prisoners and detainees, among whom the senior Hamas figure Yahya Sinwar stood out in particular.
Most recently, on September 22, 2026, Barghouti’s son, Arab Barghouti, appeared on Piers Morgan’s BBC program and called for his father’s release. In the interview, Arab repeated the comparison, which must be described as baseless, between the mass murderer and Nelson Mandela. He presented himself as a moderate by expressing support for a “two-state solution” and claiming that his father supported this solution and could therefore advance it if he were released from prison. He did not, of course, deny his father’s involvement in mass murder, but argued that “we need to see the bigger picture.”
It should be noted that at a later stage, during the Swords of Iron war, Hamas demanded Barghouti’s release as part of both prisoner exchange deals reached in indirect negotiations with Israel over the release of hostages, in January and October 2025. Needless to say, Israel rejected Hamas’s demand outright in both deals.
During the negotiations over these agreements, Hamas insisted forcefully on the release of Yahya Sinwar and also demanded Barghouti’s release, but without the same degree of force, intensity, or determination. This emerges from conversations I recently held with senior Palestinian Authority officials, including individuals who held official positions within the governing establishment at the time. Their accounts suggested that Hamas had not adopted a particularly demanding or uncompromising position regarding Barghouti’s release in its negotiations with Israel. They explained that Hamas sought to prevent a situation in which the Palestinian Authority would be headed by a leader enjoying broad and overwhelming popular support. Such a leader could establish himself in a position of strength from which he could directly challenge Hamas as a rival.
Israel Under Fire Over His Imprisonment
Throughout the years he has been serving his sentence in an Israeli prison, complaints and protests have been raised by Barghouti’s immediate family, including his wife and children, as well as by his lawyers, over the harsh conditions in which he has been held in the various prisons where he has served his sentence. In this context, his family and attorneys have made allegations they describe as irrefutable, claiming that prison guards subjected him to brutal beatings and torture using sticks and batons. These incidents reportedly left him with injuries and bruises on various parts of his body. It should be noted that during his first period of imprisonment, in 1978, when he was just 19 years old, Barghouti was allegedly subjected to a brutal assault that left a scar on his forehead, which remains visible to this day, according to his family.
Palestinian media have reported several specific incidents over the past two years in which Barghouti was physically assaulted inside the prison where he was serving his sentence, including on March 24 and 25 and April 18, 2026. Reports published in the Palestinian media emphasized that he had been denied medical treatment for the injuries he sustained. In addition, in March 2024, The Washington Post reported that, according to his family, Barghouti had been abused by Israel Prison Service guards. Among other things, he was allegedly placed in a dark solitary confinement cell and forced to listen continuously to Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah,” for a period lasting no fewer than 12 days.
The convicted terrorist’s family, along with political figures close to him, have exploited his imprisonment and his popularity among Palestinians to attack and vilify Israel over its incarceration of the murderer. Despite completing a PhD while in prison, and despite having enjoyed improved detention conditions for most of his sentence until the changes introduced by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, his family and associates have circulated countless accounts of alleged atrocities committed against him during his imprisonment. Since the outbreak of the Swords of Iron war, following Hamas’s murderous terrorist attack on communities near the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, they have claimed that Barghouti has been subjected to beatings and torture, as well as “documented public threats by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.” In July 2026, for example, Barghouti’s family reported that he had sustained an injury to one of his legs after prison guards fired rubber bullets at him.
In statements published over the years in Palestinian media on behalf of his family and lawyers, it has been repeatedly emphasized that Barghouti has maintained a strong spirit throughout his imprisonment and that all the measures of pressure and repression directed against him have failed to “break him.” Few mass murderers in the world are given the opportunity to study, write books, and distribute them from their prison cells. In a book he wrote several years after beginning his sentence in an Israeli prison, titled A Thousand Days of Imprisonment, Barghouti described his personal feelings while in prison during one of the Muslim holidays and complained that he was unable to celebrate it under appropriate conditions.
In a message from April 2026 addressed to the “Palestinian people” and delivered by released prisoner and Fatah activist Zakaria Zubeidi, Barghouti expressed, among other things, his hope that Palestinian prisoners would be pardoned and that the wounded would recover.
The Bottom Line
Israel rightly regards Barghouti as an arch-terrorist with the blood of Israelis on his hands. On the Palestinian street, however, he is viewed as a hero and a patriot devoted to his people, and even as a unifying national leader. The sympathy and support he enjoys in the Palestinian territories have grown even stronger, particularly because he is serving five consecutive life sentences in an Israeli prison. Under these circumstances, he is seen in Judea and Samaria, and to a considerable extent in the Gaza Strip as well, as someone who has paid a heavy personal price for the Palestinian cause for more than a generation. His popularity works against him in Gaza, where Hamas will not allow a popular leader to head the Palestinian Authority. In any case, his early release currently appears irrelevant and inconceivable. Nevertheless, the possibility cannot be ruled out that he could be released in the future as part of an effort to advance an Israeli-Palestinian political settlement. Such a move could involve additional Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, as well as the American administration, and form part of an expansion of the Abraham Accords.
