CAIRO, Egypt — He entered prison 21 years ago for planning a deadly suicide bombing. He left prison in October as an award-winning novelist.
Bassem Khandaqji, 41, was one of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees released by Israel in the Gaza ceasefire deal. In exchange, Hamas released the remaining living hostages captured when the militant group attacked southern Israel in October 2023.
Khandaqji was serving three life terms in an Israeli prison for dispatching a suicide bomber to an outdoor market in Tel Aviv in 2004, killing three Israeli civilians.
In prison, Khandaqji wrote several works of fiction including A Mask the Color of the Sky. It won Arabic literature's most prestigious fiction prize last year. The novel is coming out in English in March.
"I try to convince my readers by my text that I'm a new man now," Khandaqji told NPR at a Marriott hotel in Cairo, where he was sent upon his release.
In a wide-ranging interview, Khandaqji spoke about the bombing that landed him in prison, the novel that brought him literary fame behind bars, and what he has been doing since his release.
The bombing
In 2004, Khandaqji was 20 and in his third year of university in the Israeli-occupied West Bank when he was arrested.
It was during the second intifada, a Palestinian uprising that lasted from 2000 to 2005 in protest of Israel's continuing occupation despite years of peace talks. During that time, Palestinian militant groups killed more than 1,000 Israelis, and the Israeli military killed several thousand Palestinians.
It was a "terrible war," Khandaqji said. "When I saw all the people around me ... being killed by the Israeli airplanes and tanks, that [made] me very angry. I was a young man."
Khandaqji and two other fellow members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) militant group were convicted for helping plan the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.
At his 2005 sentencing, Khandaqji addressed the Israeli military court judges, telling them he had studied about Jewish suffering under the Nazis, and that Israel had become like the perpetrators of the Holocaust in the way they treated Palestinians.
"You are a victim who became a monster," he said in court, according to the transcript of the proceedings. "Let me say with sorrow and pain that on this land there are new Nazis who are leading their people to destruction."
In their verdict, the Israeli judges addressed Khandaqji's remarks: "We have no interest in addressing these delusional claims; it is enough to say with certainty that no expression of remorse can be found in them."
Out of prison two decades later, Khandaqji told NPR he had wanted the bomber to attack a military target, not civilians. "From the beginning, I told my friends or my comrades in the cell of the PFLP ... I don't believe in targeting the civilians," he said. "I told them we should attack just a military target. Checkpoints, camps, bases."
He said he did not feel regret for his actions, but if he could turn back the clock, he would not have resorted to violence.
"Did I mean ... to send this suicide bomber to Tel Aviv to kill these people? No! I don't believe in targeting the civilians," Khandaqji told NPR. "It was a horrible period. It was a complicated period. And if the history will return back, I will never use the same tools."
Writing behind bars
In prison, Khandaqji began writing novels, finding ways to smuggle them out for publication — he wouldn't say how.
In 2024, while still behind bars, he won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Often called the Arabic Booker prize, it's considered Arabic literature's highest honor.
His award-winning novel, A Mask the Color of the Sky, is about a Palestinian man with a degree in archaeology who is writing a novel about Mary Magdalene. He finds an Israeli man's ID card — colored blue, like the sky — and uses it, like wearing a mask, to pose as an Israeli, in order to cross from the occupied West Bank into Israel. He joins an archaeological dig, gaining insights into the lives of Israelis whose world is usually off-limits to him as a Palestinian.
Similarly, Israel convicted Khandaqji, who was studying journalism at a West Bank university at the time, for using press credentials to enter Israel and prepare for the 2004 bombing. Khandaqji declined to comment to NPR on the claim.
Writing about Israelis as a Palestinian
In prison, Khandaqji studied political science by correspondence, focusing on Israeli studies. He still considers himself as engaged in the Palestinian struggle against Israel, now using words, not weapons. He calls himself anti-colonialist and believes in a shared destiny in one state, Palestinians and Jews together.
"Unfortunately in Palestinian literature, there is no clear presence inside the Palestinian stories or novels of the other, of the Jews. ... It's a stereotype presence. It's not talking about the true life ... the Israeli, he's a human, like us. He is not just a soldier," Khandaqji said.
Israeli literature, he argued, portrays Palestinians as villains. "So I can't treat the Israelis inside my text like that. I'm looking for a new ethic discourse."
An estimated hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been incarcerated and detained in Israel over the decades for alleged offenses ranging from membership in militant groups to rock throwing to murder. Books and essays written in or about Israeli prisons are a defining feature of contemporary Palestinian literature. Khandaqji's award-winning book stands out among other Palestinian prison literature, said Issa Qaraqe, the former head of the Palestinian national library and a former prisoner himself.
"This book doesn't directly address the prison experience like the majority of literature by Palestinian prisoners," Qaraqe told NPR. "The book steps out of the prison and talks about Palestinian history and identity in confronting the Zionist and Biblical identity."
"They want my words"
At the literature prize award ceremony in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, last year, the head of the jury, Syrian novelist Nabil Suleiman, announced the book had won the $50,000 prize for intertwining "the personal and political in innovative ways ... with new narrative forms," and for exploring self-awareness and the awareness of the other.
Khandaqji's brother accepted the award on his behalf. In prison, Khandaqji said he found out about his prize from his "very angry" interrogators, who took him out of his cell to question him.
"I told my investigator that if I [had known] that my words will hurt you like that, I [would have decided] to write a hundred years ago," Khandaqji said.
Since then, he has written another novel in the same series, but from the perspective of the Israeli character whose ID was found.
In prison, Khandaqji said, he would write at 4 or 5 in the morning, when the other prisoners were asleep, hiding his writing from them and his jailers.
"That's the most fascinating thing. I can't write without this secrecy, without feeling that I am wanted [by] the jailer," Khandaqji said. "I turned [into] a wanted man, and my words too, they want my words."
A novel in his head
After the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Palestinian prisoners had their personal belongings confiscated, including pen and paper. Khandaqji said he wrote an entire novel in his head about another prisoner. The a book was based on his friend Walid Daqqa, a fellow writer who became ill with cancer and was denied clemency. Daqqa died in prison last year.
"It's an amazing experience to write inside your head without any pen," he said. "I took my novel with me when I was released."
More than 100 of the prisoners serving long sentences for deadly attacks who were released in October have been banished to Egypt on the condition, demanded by Israel, that they never return to their homes in the Palestinian territories.
Some of the released prisoners said Israeli authorities prevented their immediate relatives from leaving the West Bank to visit them in Egypt. Being exiled far from their families and communities imposes a sense of isolation on the prisoners' sudden freedom after decades living behind bars.
"I'm so scared from the exile," Khandaqji said. "Maybe the prison, it's ... easier for me."
Out of prison
Since he was released, Khandaqji has appeared at book talks in Cairo where he autographs his novel. He plans to pursue a doctorate in Israeli studies.
"I'm working to continue my project of writing, how to write an anti-colonial narrative inside the colonial context," he said.
Before he was released from an Israeli prison, an Israeli investigator asked him if he would speak with the families of the people killed in the suicide bombing he helped plan.
"I told him, yeah, maybe in the future," Khandaqji said. "Maybe I will call them."
Ahmed Abuhamda reported from Cairo, Nuha Musleh reported from Ramallah, West Bank, Sawsan Khalife reported from Jerusalem and Daniel Estrin reported from Tel Aviv.
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