His eyes are wide open penetrating bars and prison wires overlooking the fields and farms of his city of Jericho and its famous palm trees always suggesting that his head should be standing up high as the palms and hills of Jericho are challenging prisons and jailers despite his long absence for 21 years.
He raised sheep while young and loved the hills and mountains of Nu’aymah and Duyuk near Jericho and still preserves the memory of its beautiful trees. There he smelled the pure air in the morning after performing the dawn prayer taking his sheep to feed them nearby where he would be resting under a palm tree.
From inside his prison prisoner Ahmad Kaabneh prays to God to grant him immediate release along with all prisoners.
Rafeef Nesreen and Zahra Kaabneh’s daughters are always on his mind. Every family visit they ask when he will be released and return home to the mountains of Jericho which yearn for him equally.
Kaabneh does not forget what happened to him on April 26 1997 as he stayed for three months in the investigation cells of Ramleh and Miskoubiyeh with his mother arrested to pressure him to confess. He was sentenced to two life sentences.
Amidst the darkness of the prison light comes out. His third daughter of a smuggled sperm was born after 21 years of detention. She is the daughter who he loved without seeing except for her pictures.
With teary eyes his daughter Zahra says that she did not feel her father’s tenderness and suffered from being separated from him. She was only two-year-old when her father was imprisoned. She also got married and did not have her father to place a kiss on her forehead like any bride would.
Due to long separation tears were rolling down Zahra’s cheeks after Nesreen was born after Kaabneh smuggled a sperm out of prison. Rafeef was born after his wife was pregnant through “In Vitro Fertilization” at the Razan Specialist Center for the Treatment of Infertility at the Arab Specialist Hospital.
Like Rafeef Zahra didn’t have her father’s kiss. She was a fetus in her mother’s womb when he was arrested. Zahra hopes that her sister will enjoy her father’s care and that she will not live the deprivation she has grown up with.
Speaking why they chose the name Rafeef which means fluttering Sara Kaabaneh the wife of the prisoner says she felt that her spirit fluttered freely from the prison of Ramon where her husband is serving his sentence to his hometown of Jericho declaring his wish to be free.
As for her wish Sara notes “I wish as all families of prisoners do that God will bless us with the completion of another prisoner exchange deal as promised by Palestinian resistance so that we could see my husband among us free of chains and shackles.”
As Kaabaneh defied the occupation by resisting it outside the prison he also challenged it inside the prison. He was one of the leaders of the battle of freedom and dignity a mass hunger strike staged by prisoners in the occupation prisons on 17 April 2017.
