On the armed struggle – Ran Shimoni in Haaretz:

‘In early August 2023, the leaders of the Hamas wings of Israel's security prisons agreed that the time was ripe for a hunger strike. Their conditions had recently worsened by order of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who signaled the change with a display of force in Ofer Prison, and a similar visit by his chief of staff, Hanamel Dorfman, at the Ketziot facility.
Mahmoud Abu Quidar, now 35, was present in the clandestine talks between the Hamas leadership and senior officials of the Israel Prison Service. He listened, spoke and participated in the decision-making. As part of the negotiations, the prisoners – aware that hunger strikes require full coordination with all the factions – reached out to Hamas in Gaza via a secret channel to get the green light.
They never imagined that the Gaza leadership would tell them to drop the idea. "We had already decided to go ahead with it – we didn't report for morning roll call, we removed the food from the cells – but they stopped us," Abu Quidar tells Haaretz in an interview.
According to Abu Quidar, "The Hamas leaders told us explicitly: 'We will deal with them, their day will come.' We didn't understand what they were talking about, what power they had to do anything. But they left it open. They said, 'We'll see you soon.' They had never spoken like that before, so we understood that something unusual was going on and reached agreements with the Prison Service about calling off the strike."’

(…)

‘A decade earlier, in 2013, when he was 24, Abu Quidar was arrested by the Shin Bet security service and the police outside his home, for planning a terrorist attack. He was tried and convicted in the Be'er Sheva District Court for multiple security offenses, including treason.
"The accused carried out a series of extremely grave offenses," Judge Yoel Eden wrote in the decision, describing Abu Quidar's actions "a gross violation of the duty of loyalty that every citizen owes the state." On January 20, 2014, he was sentenced to 11 years in a security facility.
Unlike most of the inmates, certainly those in the Hamas wings, he had not acted in the name of the Palestinian national struggle or under the auspices of a terrorist organization, but to preserve his family's honor.
"In November 2012, they [the state] demolished houses in our village," he says. "They demolished my brother's house, the houses of other family members, and my mother was physically injured during the evacuation." Sitting by his mother's side at the hospital, seething with rage and deeply insulted, the seeds of resistance sprouted within him.’

(…)

‘According to the Palestinian Prisoner's Club, since the start of the war, 72 Palestinians have died in Prison Service and military detention facilities. Last month, Haaretz reported that the state is refusing to release reports about the condition of the security prisoners.
"You get four slices of bread a day. Sometimes, uncooked rice or a raw potato. If anyone complained, they were beaten," relates Abu Quidar, who lost 15 kilograms during his incarceration – photographs on his phone show the physical state he had reached.
"I never met the Gazans who arrived afterward –they were held in separate wings – but people who were with them in transfers [to different facilities] or in transport said their condition was even worse. What's happening in the prisons is a true horror."
How did the inmates react on the day itself, when it became clear that Israel was under attack? "I remember waking up from the air-raid sirens. Then I started hearing noises from the other cells, and at the morning roll call the guards showed up wearing vests and other gear, so I realized something serious was happening. But I assumed it was just a missile attack.
"We were as surprised as everyone else when we saw the Nukhba (Hamas elite brigade) vehicles in Sderot. No one in the prison believed the people in Gaza were capable of that. Some prisoners even got scared, as if something supernatural was happening.
"At about 9 A.M.," he continues, "we saw photos of abducted soldiers. When [inmates] saw people being abducted, they started celebrating. There were inmates with 20 years left on their sentences – they understood this meant they could be freed.
"But some prisoners reacted differently. I remember a Gazan guy who was only worried about what would happen to his family once Israel retaliated. He couldn't stop thinking about that."’

(…)

‘Based on your close acquaintance with inmates over the years, what do you think leads a person to decide to join an armed struggle? "We should divide this into two types of people. Some are motivated by ideology, because from their point of view, they're resisting the occupier and will continue no matter what. They believe it's necessary to fight Israel, that there's an occupation and the only way to be free of it is through war. That type consists mainly of Hamas leaders, people who remained [in prison] after the Shalit deal [in 2011, Israel freed more than 1,000 security prisoners in return for Hamas' release of captured soldier Gilad Shalit].
"The second group are the majority in prison. I call them the incited. There are masses of them in the prisons. They don't understand much, they don't have a true ideology, but they feel the occupation on their necks every day. They also absorb a great deal of incitement, more and more, until the opportunity arrives and they act."’

(…)

‘"Sinwar [former Hamas leader] comported with Israel the way he did with the Prison Service when he was an inmate – constantly testing the boundaries and stretching them more and more. When he returned to Gaza and saw that he had 30,000 soldiers, he realized that this method could work there, too. He played for time, armed himself, until he acted. But he didn't think for a minute about what would happen afterward. He didn't care what would happen to the people in Gaza."’

Read the article here.

Prison is not only an university for criminals (Foucault) but also a training center for the armed struggle.

And Sinwar understood the Israeli mentality better than most Israelis.

At a certain point the Jews in Israel will be almostindistinguishable from the Palestinians.

At a certain point Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine will find a common enemy and work together.