Israeli forces have captured four of the six Palestinian prisoners who made a bold escape from the high-security Gilboa prison earlier this week Palestinian and Israeli media reported. the Israeli army has poured troops into the occupied West Bank and led a massive manhunt followed by a crackdown on Palestinian prisoners across its prisons in what was seen as "collective punishment" by Palestinian factions and rights groups. a high-profile former commander of Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Mohamed Qassem Ardah were arrested near the Palestinian town of Shibli–Umm al-Ghanam hours after Mahmoud Abdullah Ardah and Yaqoub Mahmoud Qadri were captured in the Jabal al-Qafzeh neighbourhood of the city of Nazareth. Zubeidi and Mohamed Ardah were found hiding in a truck parking lot near Nazareth Lawyers for the four prisoners said on Saturday that they have been denied access to their clients and Israeli intelligence continues to withhold information from them. "Our legal team is making a great and unremitting efforts to follow up on the fate of the four prisoners who were re-arrested by the occupation forces and to know their conditions and places of detention," the Palestinian Commission of Detainees Affairs said in a statement we have not been able to obtain information about their health and psychological conditions," Mahajna said. Following the escape from the high-security Gilboa prison on Monday, Israeli authorities arrested family members of the prisoners in what the Palestinian Prisoners' Society described as an attempt to pressure the escapees to turn themselves in Israeli authorities launched a manhunt and increased their military presence in the West Bank installing checkpoints at entrances to Palestinian towns where security officials believe the prisoners could have fled to Gilboa prison is 4km north of the West Bank and 14km west of Israel's border with Jordan On Thursday, Jordanian officials denied media reports that the escapees had crossed into their territory Fatah condemned the capture of the four prisoners on Saturday saying it will not weaken the resolve of Palestinians and Palestinian prisoners in the struggle against the Israeli occupation "The brutal assault and re-arrest of Zubeidi and his companions by the occupation army and security forces is a violation of international law which dictates that detainees are to be protected and not harmed," it said in a statement "The Israeli government bears full responsibility for any harm inflicted on the lives of our heroic detainees." the Palestinian Liberation Organisation said that Palestinian detainees are considered prisoners of war under international law and called on the international community to ensure the safety of Palestinian prisoners and put a stop to the inhuman conditions in Israeli prisons. On Saturday morning, Israeli forces used tear gas and sound bombs to disperse a group of Palestinian students marching towards the northern entrance of Bethlehem to protest against the capture of the four prisoners, according to the Palestinian state news agency Wafa. Palestinian activists and factions have called for a general strike in the West Bank and Israel in solidarity with the captured prisoners Activists also called for massive rallies to take place across Palestinian territories on Saturday afternoon the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) has launched a crackdown on Palestinian prisoners and decreasing the number of inmates able to walk in the yard Israel has also banned family visits for Palestinian prisoners The restrictions led to rising tensions inside Gilboa The IPS also began relocating hundreds of Islamic Jihad-linked inmates In Ketziot Prison, in the Negev region of southern Israel, Palestinian prisoners set fire to seven cells in protest at a raid carried out by special units and Israeli soldiers deployed from a nearby military base Meanwhile, Palestinians protested on Friday in several towns in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip in solidarity with prisoners inside Israeli jails Israeli forces stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque compound and dispersed a sit-in protest being held in solidarity with the prisoners At the gates of the compound, Hazem al-Jolani, a doctor from East Jerusalem's Shuafat neighbourhood was killed after being severely wounded by Israeli fire Israeli forces closed al-Aqsa's Lion's Gate following the incident and stormed Jolani's house in Shuafat Copyright © 2014 - 2025. Middle East Eye Only England and Wales jurisdiction apply in all legal matters Middle East Eye ISSN 2634-2456 Sarah Jilani Features11 June 2024ArtReview What can any image say about a continuous history of occupation Palestinian Jewish theorist and filmmaker Ariella Aïsha Azoulay proposed that we might usefully think about imperial violence in terms of the action of a camera shutter ‘This brief operation can transform an individual rooted in her life-world into a refugee a whole shared world into a thing of the past,’ she writes in Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism She is thinking here of how technologies of knowledge production – imaging interpreting – can and were used to render colonial violence invisible in archives It is not necessarily the camera itself that is always an apparatus of violence Azoulay reminds us that the camera often ‘made visible and acceptable imperial world destruction and legitimated the world’s reconstruction on empire’s terms’ Between that ‘individual rooted in her life-world’ Those dynamic social practices that sustain her life-world are translated into frozen documented and displayed by an expert – be they historian curator or NGO worker – ‘who at best may not share in that same life-world and at worst is trained to ignore or belittle what stands in the way of imperial violence because that world can be presented as ‘a thing of the past’ given that the action of the camera’s shutter can only capture what is the past once that action is over the photograph wields the power to imply that the worlds that empire destroyed were already things of the past Nothing about the operation of a shutter can ever again appear neutral or independent of its outcome when we aspire to witness ‘for and with others targeted by imperial violence’ The Palestinian photographer Ahlam Shibli’s genre-spanning works can be understood as an exercise in doing just that Shibli is an artist who works with lens-based mediums Best known for her photography (though also a filmmaker) Shibli operates an aesthetic that has often been associated with the documentary style Her close attention to the living conditions social histories and environments of Palestinian communities can certainly merit the label but the socio-political inflections of the word ‘documentary’ sit uneasily with the ways in which Shibli handles themes such as occupation like the series of six black-and-white photographs from 1997 titled Horse Race in Jericho evoke no sense of a documentarian’s eye behind the lens shape and texture shows a formal expertise in her chosen medium her eye is never that of one who stands apart from their subject in the third image from Horse Race in Jericho two racers are pictured in full gallop from a child’s eye-level This unusual compositional choice seems to place the photographer alongside the two Palestinian boys watching the action in the first image of the series: one has the protective arm of an older brother around the other is also reinforced by the second image of the series Shibli turns her back to the fierce Jericho sun to deliberately cast her own shadow on the sands; torso bent her left elbow pointing skywards to steady her shot the photographer’s corporeal presence turns her into a participant-spectator of the cultural practice participation and commitment is a conscious and powerful representational choice when we speak of a people and a place marked by 76 years of dispossession online biographies and exhibition brochures abound with the claim that Shibli is above all a photographer who destabilises the concept of home and identity given the extraordinary conditions of Palestinian life Shibli is interested in the many processes people undertake to create a makeshift sense of home – whether via rituals in the 24-colour-photograph series Unrecognised (1999–2000) homemaking in the Bedouin village of ‘Arab al-N’aim looks like the children’s drawings on the corrugated iron exteriors of homes and the traditionally hand-embroidered shirts women wear a 2007 series of 47 images about Palestinian refugees in Jordan it is in the carefully preserved family albums But it may be equally true to say Shibli captures how a home under occupation must cease being a place and become a process Discussing nation-building after colonialism in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) Frantz Fanon warns that ‘nation’ – the collective home that is to be built in the image of its people not in that of their coloniser – must be a verb It is not found in ‘the flag and the palace where sits the government’ enlightened action’ of people working ‘to create a prospect that is human’ While place never ceases to be vitally important to the Palestinian condition when a home is made unhomely through either unceasing violence (for those who stayed) or the pain of exile (for those who left) Shibli’s series of 72 colour and black-and-white photographs titled Positioning (1997–2002) is a striking record of what this may look like The series features differently lit and composed photos that suggest some geographical distance between shots ‘Home’ could be found in the traditional wedding celebrations of a young couple or in the Palestinian food an elderly woman is dishing out of a large cooking pot Home could be his goat to a young Palestinian boy in yet another image or in the young men dancing the dabke with keffiyeh tied to their waists These all capture a diverse community keeping their cultural life-world alive Included among these are photos that remind the viewer this life-world has long been under siege show worldwide demonstrations in support of Palestine over three decades These overwhelmingly feature people of the Global South: Brazilian crowds unfurl a banner that reads ‘All Support for the Intifada’ in Portuguese; an African-American man runs past a KFC with a placard that reads ‘Free Our Brothers & Sisters!’ Exemplary of Shibli’s preference for a sequence of witnessed moments instead of composed Positioning captures a world that positions its struggles adjacent to those of Palestinians while not all of Shibli’s works are about her homeland her entire oeuvre is nevertheless underpinned by a transformation from spectating-observing to connecting-witnessing for and with others This also extends to minority communities in a series titled Eastern LGBT (2004/06) which challenges the Orientalist lens (a whole host of visual cultural and spatial mythologies around Arabs and Asians that served the interests of colonialism) Far from depicting lives lived in a state of fear exclusion and danger – the narrative often imagined in the West – Shibli’s camera instead roves around dressing rooms and backstage areas to capture both collectively charged and tenderly intimate moments placards that read ‘Proud to Be Queer and Muslim’ are readied for a march; in others we see queer folks enjoy solo moments of self-admiration in front of a mirror On 6 September 2023, almost exactly a month before Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel from Gaza – and Israel retaliated on a scale that has led to allegations of genocide currently under consideration at the International Court of Justice – Shibli’s photographic series Death (2011–12) was presented at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo is also about the destruction of Palestinian livelihoods is another interrogation of the idea of ‘home’ but within the context of German Gastarbeiter ‘guest workers’.) In resurrecting her older series Death at São Paulo Shibli may seem to have had a disconcerting premonition – over the next seven months over 35,000 Palestinians were killed including over 15,000 infants and children But if it is foremost death that the occupier has brought upon this land that the main preoccupation of Shibli’s Death series is life it explores mnemonic and commemorative practices around Palestinian martyrdom in the city of Nablus in the West Bank The location of Death is deliberate; Nablus was one bastion of resistance during the Second Intifada (2000–05) for which it was kept under curfew for over a record-breaking 100 days Palestinian resistance has taken many forms since the 1948 Nakba: violent Death focuses on the one constant in this history: martyrdom which is here culturally understood as a death caused by the occupation which must find and verify cause and effect Shibli asks her viewer to start (perhaps uncomfortably) by accepting that the lived experiences of Palestinians are justification enough for using the term to describe many manner of deaths young men idle at the entrance of a graveyard in Balata refugee camp watched over by commemorative posters of their fallen friends verdantly green tombs feature stones that bear portraits of their inhabitants as they were in life: often young men proudly posing with an automatic rifle – either in front of a cheap studio background or alongside digitally superimposed faces and lettering that commemorates a relative whose example they followed to martyrdom the faces of young men (and some women) are displayed on rugs walls and lockets; they are carefully dusted and polished by family members in the certainty that the dead Shibli’s choice of the term martyr is deliberate in her 2013 essay titled ‘The Truth in My Photographs’ our participation in calling for ‘the end of a situation that breeds “martyrs”; it requests the end of occupation’ Shibli’s lens points to where those contexts bitterly continue to be one and the same A retrospective of Ahlam Shibli’s photographic work, Dissonant Belonging, is on view at luma Westbau, Zürich, through 8 September Sarah Jilani is a lecturer in postcolonial literatures and world film at City Yuwen Jiang Features J.J. 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