Journalist or Russian Spy? The Strange Case of Pablo González

One afternoon in March 2014, while reporting on Russia’s covert operation to annex Crimea, I spotted a familiar figure. With his muscular build and shiny shaved head, Pablo González was easy to recognise from afar. I had first met González, a freelance journalist from the Basque Country, on a training course for reporters who work in conflict zones. Now we had run into each other in a place that was threatening to turn into one.

González was with a Ukrainian journalist, who had contacts at the besieged military base I was on my way to scope out. He arranged for the three of us to slip inside, where we found a detachment of Ukrainian marines on edge. Outside, an angry crowd of locals was yelling pro-Russian slogans, but these people were just cover for the Russian army, the marines said. They were expecting an imminent visit from a Russian general, and agreed that we could leave a Dictaphone on the base, for them to covertly record the conversation.

Some time later, I received audio of the emotional encounter that followed, in which a man identifying himself as a senior general in the Russian army gave the marines an ultimatum to surrender, prompting furious protests. The recording was hard evidence that Vladimir Putin’s denials of Moscow’s coordinating role in Crimea were nonsense. It felt like listening to a piece of history unfold in real time. I was grateful to González for helping me get the story, but after that day I never saw him again.

Eight years later, in the early hours of 28 February 2022, González was arrested in the Polish city of Przemyśl. It was a few days after the start of the latest and most brutal episode in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the first moments of which we had witnessed back on the Crimean base. A terse statement from Polish authorities said that González was suspected of “participation in the activities of a foreign intelligence service”. They claimed he was an agent of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. He faced up to 10 years in prison.

At the time, the story barely registered, given that Russian troops were bearing down on Kyiv. But a few months later, a claim about González caught my attention. Richard Moore, the head of Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service, used a rare public appearance to announce that González had only been “masquerading as a Spanish journalist”. In reality, claimed Moore, he was a so-called “illegal” – a deep-cover Russian spy, usually one who appropriates a foreign identity for long-term missions abroad. Illegals typically spend years in training to convincingly impersonate foreigners. Polish authorities believed Pablo was really Pavel, and had been born in Moscow.

I have been fascinated by Russian illegals for years, and have even written a book about the history of the programme. Now it turned out that I may have crossed paths with one in the field, without suspecting a thing. Perhaps, on that day at the Crimean base, González had been carrying out other tasks besides journalism. But friends and colleagues from Spain were not convinced by the MI6 chief’s claim. Far from disguising his Russian background, they said, González had never denied he was of Russian origin. Among friends at home in the Basque Country, he was widely known as Pavel, or “the Russian”.

Two years passed after the arrest. Poland released no evidence to the public, and no date was set for a trial. Had the Poles pounced on an innocent journalist, misinterpreting his Russian roots as something more sinister? González’s Spanish wife, Oihana Goiriena, claimed his prolonged detention was aimed at breaking him. “Our hypothesis is that, in the absence of evidence, they want to destroy him morally and emotionally so that he signs whatever they put in front of him,” she told a Spanish journalist.

Then, in August 2024, the biggest prisoner exchange between Russia and the west since the end of the cold war got under way at Ankara airport in Turkey. Russia freed a group of political prisoners, as well as several high-profile foreign detainees held in Russian jails, including the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. In return, a number of Russians detained in the west headed back home. A government plane picked them up in Ankara, and television crews were standing by when the plane landed in Moscow. On the tarmac, Putin was waiting. A guard of honour stood either side of a red carpet, for the returnees’ first steps back on Russian soil.

Out came Vadim Krasikov, convicted of murdering a Chechen dissident in a Berlin park. Then came a husband and wife illegal team arrested in Slovenia, who had spent more than a decade abroad posing as Argentinians. They walked down the steps towards Putin with their two young children, who had only just found out they were actually Russians. Next came a tall, bald and bearded man wearing a Star Wars T-shirt emblazoned with “Your Empire Needs You”. It was Pablo González.

Putin gathered the returnees inside the airport terminal building. Addressing those in the group who had been sent abroad on official service, he said: “You will all receive state awards, and we will see each other again to talk about your future. For now, I just want to congratulate you on your return home.”

For some of González’s most ardent supporters, this was the moment their convictions about his innocence crumbled. “For the last two years I was always defending Pablo, saying that he needs a proper free and open trial,” one friend, a fellow reporter, told me. “But you’d have to be pretty naive to think that Russia goes around the world rescuing journalists. I think with this handshake [with Putin], he is proven guilty.”

Other friends are still convinced of his innocence, and from Moscow, González denies he ever had any links to Russian intelligence, according to his Spanish lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, who still speaks to him by phone regularly. Boye told me the fact that Poland held González in pre-trial detention for more than two years without ever putting him in front of a judge was proof the case was flawed.

In the weeks since the prisoner exchange, I have interviewed dozens of people who knew González. I have also met with current and former security and intelligence officials in Poland and Ukraine, spoken to those familiar with the Polish evidence against him, and investigated his family history. I hoped to answer some of the questions that those who knew González were now turning over in their heads. Was there any chance at all he was an innocent journalist, wrongly accused? Or if he really was a Russian spy, when was he recruited?

***

I first met González in 2011, on a week-long training course for journalists in the Welsh countryside. As I pieced together his life story, I realised it had been a key year for him. He started to write his first newspaper articles for Gara, a small leftist newspaper published in the Basque Country. He married his Spanish girlfriend in a ceremony in the town of Guernica. And then in November, he headed to Wales.

The course, which is run by former British army officers, aims to equip journalists with the skills to survive in war zones. There is an invaluable first aid component, as well as a role-play element of more dubious value. Back in 2011, we were told to imagine the back roads of rural Wales were in fact deepest Peru. A few minutes after setting off on a “reporting assignment”, our fleet of Jeeps was pulled over by two men in bandanas, screaming furiously and waving automatic rifles.

As we were marched at gunpoint through the woods, instead of going along with the captors’ demands, González furiously berated them. Eventually, he managed to persuade our kidnappers to release us all. “Wow, this guy is a hero,” James Brown, who went on to have a career in international aid work, remembered thinking at the time. “But is this the way we’re meant to be responding?”

González introduced himself to us as a Spanish freelancer; when I contacted others from the course, nobody could remember whether he had mentioned any Russian roots. But I do recall that he was a passionate and funny storyteller during the long and boozy evenings we spent at the hotel bar. I have a strong memory of him pulling himself up by a wooden frame suspended above the counter one evening, and thrusting his hips vigorously in mid-air, to illustrate some anecdote or other.

These stories – the kidnap heroics and the drunken hi jinx – chimed with many stories about González I would hear from people who encountered him over the next decade. In some, he came across as a heavy-drinking buffoon; in others, he was a charming presence, skilled at forging friendships and making high-level professional connections. He frequently reported from war zones, and sometimes showed real bravery. Once, during a shelling attack in Nagorno-Karabakh, he even helped bring two severely wounded French journalists to safety.

I don’t know if González was already being prepared for life as a spy back in Wales in 2011, or when we met in Crimea in 2014. But by 2016, the Polish case files allege, he was very much active, using his job as a journalist as cover to get access to some of the Kremlin’s biggest enemies.

***

Zhanna Nemtsova was 30 when her father was murdered in 2015. Boris Nemtsov, one of Putin’s most persistent critics, was shot four times in the back from a passing car while he was walking home through central Moscow, late one evening in February 2015. A few months later, after receiving threats herself, Nemtsova decided to leave Russia. From exile, she set up a foundation in her father’s name, with the goal of supporting independent media and political activism in Russia. In January 2016, she was in Strasbourg for a meeting that called on the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly to appoint a special rapporteur to investigate her father’s murder.

During a break in proceedings, Nemtsova was approached by a tall, confident man speaking lightly accented Russian. He told her his name was Pablo González, and said he worked for Gara, a newspaper in the Basque Country. Would she grant him an interview? Nemtsova politely declined; she had never heard of Gara and had a packed schedule. But González did not give up easily. He persuaded a friend of Nemtsova’s to put in a good word for him and in the end, she agreed to the interview. “I don’t remember any of the questions, which shows it was nothing unusual,” Nemtsova told me recently.

After their first meeting, Nemtsova put González on the mailing list for the foundation’s public events. He always came, and gradually got to know her better. She found him funny and easy-going. At some point, their relationship took a romantic turn. Through Nemtsova and her associates, González met many other Russian dissidents.

As I called around different contacts in the Russian opposition, I was struck by just how many of them had met González. They described him as a flirty, chatty and warm character who was always up for a beer or six. He was meticulous about staying in touch, and he often acted as tour guide for his new Russian friends on visits to Spain. For one group of Russian exiles, he offered a tour of the Basque Country, taking them to an atmospheric lunch club in a village not far from his home, where he seemed to know everyone.

González would tell his new Russian friends that he was married with children, but he said the relationship with his wife had long broken down and that now they were more like friends. Although he mentioned having some Russian heritage, he allegedly said he had not been to Russia since childhood and even asked his Russian opposition contacts for advice on how to get a visa. If any of them had Googled his journalism, they would have found articles written for Gara from Moscow.

But nobody was doing background checks. “He was in this circle of opposition journalists and activists,” said Pavel Elizarov, a political activist and former associate of Nemtsova’s. “We don’t need to discuss Putin’s politics because we all know we are on the same page.”

***

In late 2017, González signed up for a five-day training course run by Bellingcat, an influential group of open-source investigators who had done impressive work to prove Russian complicity in the shooting down of a Malaysian Airlines plane over east Ukraine in 2014. The course allowed González to meet many of the people working on Bellingcat investigations, including the group’s founder, Eliot Higgins. Some of the other participants would have been of interest to Russian intelligence, too: they included journalists from leading publications, as well as a senior executive of a tech company that would later sign a contract with a US government department worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

González also continued to stay close to the Russian opposition, and in 2018 he went back to Strasbourg, where Alexei Navalny – Putin’s most high-profile critic – was on a rare visit outside Russia, to speak at the European court of human rights. After the hearing, Navalny and a few others went for drinks at the home of one of the lawyers. It was a friends-only gathering, but somehow González made the cut.

As their on-off relations disintegrated, Nemtsova began to ask herself some questions. Here was a freelancer writing columns for fairly small Spanish outlets, yet he seemed to have the money for constant travel and all the latest gadgets. It reminded her of a phenomenon she knew well from her former life in Russia: the person who lives above their means, the humble bureaucrat with the mansion and the fancy car. In Russia, it was a fairly clear indicator of corruption. But what could it mean in Europe? A possible answer dawned on her.

Each summer, Nemtsova organised a journalism summer school in Prague. González gave a lecture there in 2018, about reporting from conflict zones, and he came again in 2019. That year, Nemtsova shared her growing suspicions about González with another speaker, the Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov, who is one of the world’s leading experts on the Russian intelligence services. Could González perhaps be a Russian operative, sent to spy on them? Soldatov dismissed the suggestion as unlikely. But the doubts continued to niggle at Nemtsova. Why did this Basque freelancer have so much money? Why did he speak such good Russian? And why was he so interested in the Russian opposition?

***

Russian illegals traditionally spend years studying language and etiquette, before setting out abroad disguised as foreigners. But “Pablo González” was not a cover identity crafted with painstaking care under the watch of the GRU. It was real, although its owner had another, Russian name too. The two different identities were the product of a mixed heritage, with its origins in the upheaval of the Spanish civil war.

González’s grandfather, Andrés González Yagüe, was among more than 30,000 children evacuated from Spain to save them from the ravages of the conflict. Most ended up in temporary foster homes in France, Belgium and elsewhere in Europe, but the ship that left in 1937 with eight-year-old Andrés on board was bound for the Soviet Union. Andrés ended up in a boarding house at Obninsk, outside Moscow. In 1939, Francisco Franco’s Nationalists won the civil war, and Moscow decided it would not return the children. Most became Soviet citizens.

Andrés gained a technical education and found work at ZiL, a huge automobile factory in the suburbs of Moscow. He married a Russian woman, Galina, and the couple had two children, Elena and Andrés Jr. In 1980, Elena married a young scientist, Alexei Rubtsov, and their son Pavel was born two years later. By the end of the decade, the Soviet Union was heading towards collapse, and so was Alexei and Elena’s marriage. In 1991, Elena left with Pavel for Spain, taking advantage of their Spanish heritage to obtain citizenship. Elena decided her son should take the maternal family surname on his new documents, and she used the Spanish form of his first name. So it was that Pavel Rubtsov became Pablo González Yagüe.

After finishing high school in Barcelona, González went on to study Slavic philology at university in Spain. Later, he began to idealise his childhood in the Soviet Union. In 2004, he acquired a Russian passport under his old name, Pavel Rubtsov. González, or Rubtsov, visited his father in Moscow regularly. “I remember that Pavel was pro-Russian, pro-Putin, but not with any fanaticism. He just seemed fascinated by Russia,” recalled a source who knew both father and son well.

Some Spanish media outlets have speculated that the key to González’s alleged GRU links could lie with his father. Intelligence affiliations in Russia are indeed often a family matter. But the source who knew the family described Alexei as a quiet, unassuming person who seemed to be the passive partner in the relationship with his second wife, Tatyana Dobrenko, González’s stepmother, who worked in the oil industry. “She was in charge of everything,” said the source.

To double-check Alexei’s background, I called up Christo Grozev, who was previously the lead Russia investigator at Bellingcat, and now works for an outlet called the Insider. Grozev is a prolific spy hunter, busting the cover of numerous Russian operatives over the years.

Grozev told me he was already looking into González’s Russian family, and later shared his preliminary findings with me. He checked González’s father for all the telltale signs of GRU affiliation – suspicious passport numbers, signs of false identities and official registration at addresses known to be linked to the GRU. The search came back clean. But on the off-chance, he also decided to take a look at Dobrenko, Alexei’s wife. And here, he started to find things that seemed strange.

To start with, there were records for two different Tatyana Dobrenkos, one born in 1954 and one in 1959, yet both linked to the same social security number. Even more curious were her official addresses over time. Prior to the apartment where González’s father lived, she was registered at 76 Khoroshevskoye Shosse, said Grozev. That address, in north-east Moscow, is home to a Soviet-era apartment block that is unremarkable except for one thing: the hulking building right next to it, at 76B. The building is commonly known as the Aquarium, and houses the headquarters of the GRU. “This alone does not prove affiliation with the GRU,” Grozev told me. “But we do see it is also the home address of other known GRU officials.” It was certainly a striking coincidence for someone whose stepson was now accused of being a GRU officer. I sent Dobrenko a message on Telegram asking for comment on these records. She read it, then blocked me without replying.

There was one more suspicious piece of evidence. Last year, the exiled Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo published a story based on a leaked database of Russian flight bookings. One of the bookings appeared to show that in June 2017, two return tickets from Moscow to St Petersburg had been bought in a single transaction: one for González, using his Russian passport, and one for a man named Sergei Turbin. There is strong evidence, according to Agentstvo, that Turbin is a GRU officer. Grozev concurred, noting his research shows he was employed by the GRU’s Fifth Department, which handles illegals. Turbin could not be reached for comment.

In short, during the same period when González had been telling Nemtsova’s associates that he was struggling to get a visa to Russia, he was apparently flying from Moscow to St Petersburg with an alleged GRU officer. I asked his lawyer, Boye, to comment on the trip. “I have no idea,” he said, irritably. “Do you know the people who were sitting next to you on your last flight? Can you guarantee that none of them have criminal records?” I pointed out that both tickets appear to have been bought in the same transaction. Did González know Turbin? Was he on the plane? Boye promised to ask González. A few days later, he told me his client had decided not to answer my questions.

***

In 2019, González began dating a Polish freelance journalist and late that year he moved to Warsaw, where the couple rented a flat together. From Warsaw, he made frequent trips home to the Basque Country to see his children, and regular reporting trips to Ukraine and elsewhere.

It was not until early February 2022 that the net began closing in. With American and British warnings in the air that Russia was about to launch a major assault on Ukraine, González had travelled with two other Spanish freelancers to Avdiivka, right on the frontline. There, he was apprehended by Ukrainian police and told to report for questioning in Kyiv, where he was interrogated for several hours. He was advised to leave the country immediately, but not arrested.

In the following days, Spanish intelligence officers visited some of González’s friends and family back home, questioning them about his background. González was furious when he found out. “They have gone to everyone with the same song, presenting me as a pig who uses everyone as a cover. It doesn’t make any sense,” he said in a voice note he sent to a friend at the time.

González returned to Spain, but when news broke on the morning of 24 February that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine had begun, he immediately booked a flight to Warsaw. Before long he was in Przemyśl, the border city through which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees were streaming into Poland. He recorded regular live reports for Spanish television channels and news websites. Late in the evening of 27 February, he returned to the dormitory where he was staying, and a few minutes after midnight there was a knock at the door. Green-clad agents of the ABW, Poland’s domestic security service, entered and informed him he was under arrest.

***

At the heart of the Polish prosecutors’ case is a series of reports that González allegedly wrote over a number of years, apparently to his supervisors in the GRU. “These were typical intelligence reports about facilities, infrastructure and people to be in touch with,” Stanisław Żaryn, national security adviser to Poland’s president, told me. Another source said these reports frequently reference “the Centre”, Russian spy code for intelligence headquarters. Some of the reports are understood to have included follow-up questions, apparently from a handler. In one from 2018, González allegedly wrote to his supervisors that he had “destroyed the electronic devices as ordered”, smashing them and tossing them in the ocean.

Several sources familiar with the Polish evidence against González told me that it includes numerous reports on his contacts in the Russian opposition. Since his arrest, the SBU security services in Kyiv have also questioned a number of his local associates and even searched some of their homes. “Over the years, his main task was going to different places near the frontline to collect information about the people working there,” claimed a Ukrainian security source I met recently in a Kyiv cafe. The source told me González had run a local network of politicians and military figures, but the SBU still did not know whether all these people thought they were simply interacting with a journalist, or whether some understood they were helping a Russian intelligence officer. The one thing the SBU is sure of is that a GRU spy with journalistic accreditation could do real damage on the frontline, acting as a spotter to locate concentrations of troops and hardware. “Thank God he was arrested before the full-scale invasion,” said the source.

While the existence of these reports sounds incriminating, it is not clear if Polish investigators possess solid proof that the reports were addressed to the GRU, or that they were ever actually sent. González, under interrogation, apparently claimed they were his own notes. He was not given the chance to defend himself in court: prosecutors only made the indictment official, the key step required for a case to proceed to trial, after he had left the country. Part of the problem may be that under Poland’s espionage law at the time of his arrest, prosecutors had to prove González caused damage to the state of Poland, while most of his alleged spying took place elsewhere. “I think everyone was quite happy when he was included in the exchange and the problem went away,” one Polish former official told me.

Without looking into the GRU archives, it is impossible to know just how useful Gonzalez’s alleged spying on the Russian opposition may have been for Moscow. But dismissing it out of hand is probably naive. Writing profiles of targets is a key part of intelligence work. “Profiling tells you how people act, what their views are, what their routines are and what their weaknesses are,” Piotr Krawczyk, the former head of Poland’s foreign intelligence service, told me. Spymasters in Moscow could use the resulting personality profile to craft a recruitment strategy, using either incentives or blackmail. Knowing a target’s daily routines was also crucial, ensuring that the operative sent to make the pitch could be in the right place at the right time. Or, instead of a recruitment officer, the GRU could send someone of Krasikov’s profile, with a gun or a vial of poison.

Some who got close to González have had to deal with a different kind of fallout. The Polish freelance journalist he was dating was arrested together with him, but was soon released after a judge ruled there was insufficient evidence to hold her. In August, however, a Polish media report revealed that there is still a case open against her for abetting espionage. Nothing has come to light that suggests she had any idea what her partner was allegedly up to, but even so, news of the open case led to an online campaign against the woman. Rightwing circles claimed her previous journalism on topics such as abortion rights in Poland was evidence she was a Russian spy following an “anti-Polish” narrative.

Nemtsova, too, is still handling the after-effects of her entanglement with González. For a brief moment, the MA programme her foundation runs at a Prague university was under threat, when a student alleged it had been compromised by Russian intelligence and thus should be discontinued. That challenge is now over; what remains is the psychological trauma of being spied on by someone close to her. “Now I don’t communicate with anyone new, and I have a very limited circle,” Nemtsova told me. “Because I am a target. You cannot live a normal life under these circumstances.”

***

From Moscow, Pablo González – or Pavel Rubtsov – has logged back into his social media accounts in recent weeks, and is in contact with his lawyer and friends in Spain. Some of these friends initially agreed to speak to me, but later called off the interviews, using variations of the phrase “Pablo wants to tell his own story”. His Spanish wife also declined an interview request, saying: “Pablo is now free and it’s he who will speak with the journalists.”

But so far, the only interview González has given was to Russian state television, a few days after his return to Moscow. In the 10-minute report, he walks the streets of his childhood neighbourhood, pointing out his primary school and other sights from his youth. He scoffs at Poland’s supposed lack of evidence against him and suggests the case is full of holes, though he is never directly asked if he had links to the GRU, and never directly denies it.

González did not respond to multiple requests to speak to me. In a phone call, his Spanish lawyer, Boye, said González has “always denied” all allegations that he worked in any way for Russian intelligence.

For those unconvinced by this denial, the main questions that remain are about what kind of operative González was. Was he really a career illegal, a longstanding officer of the GRU? Polish officials have publicly claimed that González has officer rank in the GRU, and one former security official told me they were certain that González “was recruited at a young age and his whole journalistic career was cover for his spying”. Nobody would say what evidence exists for such claims, however.

For now, an alternative theory seems more plausible: that González was a genuine Spanish journalist with Russian roots, who was then recruited at some point, possibly during his trips to Moscow to visit his father and stepmother. Such an offer would have provided an opportunity to reconnect with the motherland he felt had been torn away from him as a child. It would also have appealed to the risk-taking side of González that so many people noted in him.

The only person who can give the full story is González himself, and for now, a tell-all interview seems unlikely. At the end of his appearance on state television, González talked about his feelings on the night he landed back in Moscow. He did not say he felt alarm about how he might adapt to life in Russia, nor did he express concern at the optics of emerging from a plane full of spies and assassins to a hero’s welcome. Something else was bothering him: “I come out and see that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is greeting us – the president! I don’t know if it was visible, but I was training my hand as I was coming down the steps,” said González, grinning. “I wanted to make sure I could give him a decent, strong, manly handshake.” •

Additional reporting by Ashifa Kassam and Pjotr Sauer

Editing by David Wolf

Marwan Barghouti, the World’s Most Important Prisoner

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This spring I took a walk through the farming village of Kobar in the West Bank. Its low-rise buildings wound around shrubs and bushes; pale pink blossom was just starting to bloom on the almond trees. On the surrounding hillsides you could see Jewish settlements – neatly ordered rows of identical villas with red tiled roofs. In the months before my visit, armed settlers from places like these had been attacking Palestinian villagers, largely with impunity. The buildings of Kobar were covered in graffiti, some of which read “Death to Israel”.

Yet on the day I was there the mood in the village was cheerful. I was being shown around by the son of Marwan Barghouti, Palestine’s most famous prisoner. Arab Barghouti, a smartly dressed life coach in his early 30s, cuts a different figure to his scruffy, moon-faced father, whose image is stencilled all over the walls of Kobar. Palestinian drivers who spotted us flashed victory signs as they passed by. “One more week!” they shouted. The release of Arab’s father, everyone felt, was imminent.

Barghouti, a Palestinian politician, activist and militant leader, was convicted of murder by an Israeli court more than two decades ago for ordering operations that killed five civilians. Though he has been shut away from the outside world since then, he is more popular with Palestinians than any other politician. A poll published in March 2024 by Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian researcher, suggested that if there were an election he would win more votes than both his nearest rivals combined. When Hamas seized 250 Israeli hostages during a murderous assault on Israel on October 7th last year, it raised the possibility of a prisoner exchange in which Barghouti might finally be freed.

The Israelis seem to be contemplating such an outcome. Weeks before I was in Kobar, a senior Israeli intelligence officer had come to the home of Barghouti’s younger brother, Moukbil. The officer politely asked if the family had heard any news about the famous prisoner. Moukbil sensed that the Israeli, who obviously knew far more about Barghouti’s situation than the family, was fishing for insights into what might happen if he were freed. Would Barghouti protest? Seek office? Fight?

It is a strange moment in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By most measures the situation is bleak. The brief optimism sparked by the Oslo accords in 1993, which were supposed to usher in a Palestinian state existing peacefully alongside Israel, was extinguished years ago. The current round of fighting is the deadliest of any since the state of Israel was created in 1948: nearly 40,000 Gazans are reported to have been killed and around 1,500 Israelis. In both cases the dead are mostly civilians. Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, shows no inclination to stop the campaign.

Yet Netanyahu remains under pressure to free the Israeli hostages, which will almost certainly mean an exchange. A mediator involved in discussions told me Barghouti’s name is second on the list of prisoners Hamas wants out. If he is released, the dynamics of the conflict could shift. Unlike the lethargic head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas, he is widely respected. Hamas’s Islamist commanders speak of him with admiration, even though he is from a secular faction. And unlike them, he has a track record of campaigning for a two-state solution. He is said to speak Hebrew flawlessly and without an accent. Several Israeli politicians count him as a friend.

“The only leader who believes in two states and will be elected against any other competitor is Marwan Barghouti,” said Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency. “It’s in our interest he’ll compete in the next Palestinian elections – the sooner, the better.”

There are many Israelis who believe Barghouti is not interested in peace now – if he ever was – and that his release will come back to haunt them. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s military leader, was freed in a prisoner exchange in 2011, and went on to plan the massacres of October 7th. “Barghouti is as bad as Hamas,” said one retired intelligence chief. “He didn’t change in prison. He became more extreme.”

In truth, it is hard to say what Barghouti believes these days. His most recent interview took place almost 20 years ago. The last known photograph of him – shackled, pale, stubbly, with thinning hair – is more than a decade old. Who is the man incarcerated beneath the high walls of Meggido prison? And could he really be, as some claim, the Palestinian Mandela?

***

The region known as Palestine was ruled by the Ottomans for hundreds of years until the British took it over in 1917. The British quickly found themselves enmeshed in a messy intercommunal conflict, exacerbated by the promises they had made to both sides. The land contained holy sites to which both Muslims and Jews claimed ownership, and both groups went on to oppose the British presence – violently at times.

In 1948 the British withdrew and the new state of Israel fought its Arab neighbours in a war for independence. During the fighting Israeli forces drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. They were not allowed back.

When an armistice was reached, Israel established itself within a boundary that became known as the “green line” (supposedly after the colour of the pen used to mark it on a map).

Barghouti was born just over a decade later in the West Bank, which fell outside Israel’s green line and was under Jordanian control. His family of nine lived crammed into a two-bedroom house; the sleek white Bauhaus buildings of Tel Aviv shimmered in the distance. There were few jobs to be had in the village: Barghouti’s father, who was a builder, sometimes travelled as far as Beirut in search of work.

In 1967, when Barghouti was nearly eight, the six-day war broke out and Israeli forces seized East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank. The Barghoutis now lived under Israeli occupation. Their neighbours were beaten up or arrested for flying Palestinian flags. Military bases and Jewish settlements sprang up around their village. Israeli soldiers shot dead the family dog for barking.

According to childhood friends Barghouti became involved in the communist party, which was influential in the occupied territories at the time. While some parties called for the destruction of Israel, the communists believed in non-violent resistance and the two-state solution. After school, Barghouti would march round central Ramallah at the head of protests. When he wasn’t studying or protesting, he helped his father build an extension on their relatives’ house and tried to steal glimpses of the family’s daughter, Fadwa.

Over time Barghouti became frustrated with how little marching seemed to achieve, and began looking elsewhere. There were many different groups jostling to represent the Palestinian cause, mostly from abroad. The best known of these was the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) which was dominated by the Fatah movement. Fatah cadres operated in the shadows, launching violent attacks on Israel from their base in Lebanon. Increasingly, Barghouti came under their sway.

When he was 18, before he’d had the chance to get to know Fadwa, he was arrested in a night-time raid on his home in Kobar. Prison guards put a filthy bag over his head, stripped him naked and beat his genitals with a stick until he fainted, he later alleged. When he came round they taunted him that he’d be unable to have children.

According to his brother, Barghouti was accused of being part of a terrorist organisation and preparing Molotov cocktails. He spent the next four and a half years in prison.

Many of his fellow inmates were from big towns and, for the first time in his life, the village boy was surrounded by people who read books. Their families and lawyers smuggled them in, and the young prisoners studied together. As the end of his sentence neared, Barghouti told his brother to ask Fadwa’s father for her hand in marriage. After he was released in 1983, the couple tied the knot.

Barghouti enrolled at Bir Zeit, the leading Palestinian university, where he studied history and politics. But he didn’t renounce activism, and spent the next few years leading campus protests against the occupation. Before his first son was born, he was arrested again.

This time he was detained for six months. While there he acquired enough Hebrew to read the Israeli newspapers which were brought to the cells each day and answer his guards back with verses from the Torah. Some of his fellow inmates had enrolled in history classes at Israel’s Open University, and he devoured the textbooks. He read about how Jewish militias had set about creating the state of Israel: setting off bombs in cinemas and hotels in their campaign against the British; unifying splinter groups into a single army; acting ruthlessly in pursuit of their goals.

He was in and out of prison after that. In 1987 Israeli authorities decided they didn’t want Barghouti stirring up any more trouble so they shoved him across the border with Jordan. Fadwa joined him in Jordan’s capital, Amman, with their toddler. He warned her not to expect a conventional life just because they were no longer being harassed by Israeli soldiers. “When Palestine is free, I will be back as a family guy,” he said.

Not long afterwards an uprising broke out across the occupied territories. Known by the Arabic word for “shaking off” – intifada – it was a campaign of civil disobedience, strikes and protests, though it also involved stone-throwing and, later, shooting. Barghouti had by then become a senior figure in Fatah’s exiled leadership and travelled around the world raising money for the uprising. At home his family kept growing, and soon he had four children. The Amman years were the most peaceful of Barghouti’s life and, the way Fadwa tells it, the most boring.

In 1993 he won a reprieve – Yasser Arafat, the PLO’s leader, struck a deal with Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, which ended the intifada. Thanks to the Oslo accords – named after the city in which they were secretly negotiated – exiles such as Barghouti were allowed to return to the occupied territories. Many of them had spent decades abroad and were out of touch with the people they presumed to represent. Palestinians scornfully called them olim hadashim – “new immigrants” in Hebrew. Barghouti, who had been away from Palestine for only five years, acted as a bridge between the occupied Palestinians and their would-be leaders.

For the first time, Fatah was able to operate openly in the West Bank, and Barghouti organised rallies against the occupation without having to fear arrest. Surreally, he also found himself socialising with Israeli politicians. Western governments supported the Oslo agreement by hosting endless peace-building conferences. Israelis and Palestinians were thrown together in English stately homes, airport lounges and fancy restaurants. Some of them developed a genuine rapport.

Barghouti liked putting his fluent Hebrew to use. Following his election to the first Palestinian parliament in 1996, he enthusiastically attended gatherings of Israeli and Palestinian MPs. His infectious good humour at these events won him friends . “Between us we have 145 years in jail,” he said as he waved at the assembled Palestinian delegation at a beachside restaurant in Tel Aviv. “And I was the one who put you all there!” replied Gideon Ezra, a former Israeli intelligence chief.

Meir Shitreet, an Israeli parliamentarian from Likud, the right-wing party currently led by Netanyahu, was particularly taken with Barghouti. He still remembers a joke that he used to tell about Arafat. The Palestinian leader was reluctant to be associated with violence, the joke went, so when his wife prepared him a dish containing the tongues of songbirds, he ordered her to keep the creatures alive. The mutilated birds then perched at the window watching Arafat devour their tongues, and tweeted: “Thun of a thitch!” (It may have been funnier in Hebrew.)

When Shitreet fell ill during a peacemaking conference in Italy, Barghouti sat at his bedside all night. “He supported peace, totally,” recalled Shitreet. “Real peace with Israel. We became really friendly.”

A commander in Shin Bet also noticed the charismatic young activist, and dropped in on his house in Ramallah to introduce himself. The commander, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Farah, has had many cordial interactions with prominent Palestinians over the years: coffee with Ahmed Yassin, the paraplegic founder of Hamas, a Jewish new year card from Arafat. But it was Barghouti who left the best impression. “He was someone we could work together with in the peace era,” said Abu Farah. Barghouti’s door was always open, said his former assistant, Samer Sinijlawi, a touch pointedly. “He never said no to meeting any Israeli.”

***

Under the terms of the Oslo accords, the Palestinians agreed to recognise the state of Israel, but the Israelis agreed only to acknowledge the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. A state would come at the end of an “interim” process, the end date of which began to look hazy.

Islamist groups seeking to derail the peace process stepped up suicide-bomb attacks on Israeli civilians. In their talks with the PLO, Israeli negotiators seemed only to want to discuss clamping down on these militants, rather than charting the path to Palestinian statehood. “Our main concern was how to deal together with terrorists,” said Abu Farah of his many meetings with Barghouti.

Meanwhile, Jewish settlements expanded in the West Bank and Gaza, and brought armed Jewish zealots with them. Deployments of soldiers followed, and Palestinians wondered whether there would be enough unoccupied territory left in which to build their state.

As disillusionment set in, Barghouti toured Israel and Palestine, warning that moderates like him would be marginalised if the Oslo process failed to deliver a Palestinian state. By then Barghouti had been promoted to secretary-general of Fatah in the West Bank, a senior position in an organisation that was trying to be a resistance movement, a political party and a government all at the same time. He was given the task of running the Tanzim, the grassroots activists who had led protests during the intifada and now acted as Fatah’s muscle on the streets. (Arafat’s office paid their budget.)

Arafat, the head of the PA, was growing reclusive – the contradictions of his position were hard to reconcile. He promised the Israelis security and the Palestinians liberation, but struggled to deliver either. Increasingly Barghouti appeared at public gatherings on Arafat’s behalf. Some spoke of the young man from Kobar as a possible successor. “Arafat looked at Barghouti like his son,” said Abu Farah. “He was thinking of him as a future leader.”

In July 2000 Bill Clinton, the American president, hosted a summit to map out a final settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians. The atmosphere was tense from the beginning, and talks broke down over the status of Jerusalem, among other intractable issues. Both sides knew violence would follow. The trigger was a provocative visit by Ariel Sharon, the leader of Likud, to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site of one of the most sacred mosques in Islam as well as Judaism’s holiest place. Barghouti was there waiting for him, with a posse of young men. They furiously denounced Sharon and hurled chairs at his security detail. The second intifada had begun.

***

Riots quickly spread across the West Bank. Barghouti said goodbye to five-star hotels and returned to more familiar territory: dodging Israeli gunfire in the back alleys of Ramallah.

Most mornings he would rally protesters and lead them to the checkpoint at the foot of Beit El, a settlement and military base on the outskirts of the town. Many protesters threw stones; Israeli soldiers responded with rubber bullets and sometimes live rounds. Occasionally Apache helicopters joined in. The protesters kept coming. After several weeks of mounting casualties, Palestinians started shooting back from the rooftops. Unlike the previous intifada, the second quickly spiralled into armed conflict.

Towards the end of 2000, Barghouti helped Arafat set up a military wing of the Tanzim, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. At first the brigade restricted itself to attacking settlements and soldiers in the occupied territories. This was enough to make Barghouti a target. A former Shin Bet commander said that plans were drawn up to assassinate him, but never carried out. Barghouti had some near misses however. Once a tank fired a shell at his vehicle as he was walking towards it, killing his bodyguard, which he saw as a warning. Each night, he slept in a different house.

His old Israeli friends tried to steer him away from militancy. “I warned him, I called him, I said ‘stay away, don’t touch terror’,” said Shitreet, who was by then justice minister. But Barghouti wanted to prove occupation had a cost. “I’m not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist,” he wrote in an editorial in the Washington Post. “I do not seek to destroy Israel but only to end its occupation of my country.”

He claimed to oppose attacks on civilians inside Israel, but within Fatah people were starting to worry the organisation looked weak compared with its Islamist rivals. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, another militant group, were pursuing a relentless suicide-bombing campaign inside the green line. One of the most devastating attacks took place in the summer of 2001, when a militant blew himself up in a nightclub in Tel Aviv and killed 21 people, 16 of whom were teenagers.

Around that time Ron Pundak, one of the Israeli architects of the Oslo process, held a secret meeting with Barghouti in a safe house in the West Bank. According to a Palestinian present at the encounter, Pundak reproached Barghouti for his turn towards violence. Barghouti replied flatly: “We can’t lose the street to Hamas.”

Towards the end of 2001 the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade decided to start dispatching suicide-bombers to kill civilians within Israel. There could scarcely have been a less diplomatically astute time to adopt such a policy. Al-Qaeda had just killed nearly 3,000 American civilians on 9/11, and Israel persuaded America that its one-time partner, the PLO, was cut from the same cloth. With what some saw as the tacit acquiescence of the White House, Israeli tanks pummelled Palestinian towns and cities. Many Palestinians began to regret the adoption of violent tactics. By the spring of 2002 Barghouti himself was mulling a unilateral ceasefire, according to a diplomat who spoke to him at the time.

On April 15th Barghouti made the mistake of using a mobile phone that Shin Bet was tracking and revealed that he was hiding in the home of a Fatah official. According to Gonen Ben Yitzhak, the Shin Bet officer who ran the operation to capture him, commandos found Barghouti using his comrade’s mother as a human shield. But unlike other Fatah leaders, Barghouti was not assassinated. Instead his captors led him off in chains crowing, “We’ve caught the head of the snake!”

***

Moskobiya, a prison in the Russian Orthodox district of Jerusalem, has been used as an interrogation centre for over a hundred years. It was here that Barghouti had been held as a teenager. On his return in 2002, Barghouti immediately asked for a meeting with Shin Bet’s head, Avi Dichter, whom he knew personally. Quick to disabuse him of any illusion of status, the Israelis offered a junior interrogator instead.

Questioning began in the early evening and continued till mid-morning, day after day, week after week. Sleep deprivation and blindfolds were de rigueur. According to the account he gave his lawyers he was shackled to his chair in a stress position. When he leant back, nails pierced his skin. Within four months, the interrogators had compiled their case. He was accused of involvement in 37 attacks or attempted attacks. Among them was a shooting in a seafood market in Tel Aviv in March 2002, in which three civilians were killed.

Barghouti wasn’t directly involved in operational matters, so the case hinged on the degree of responsibility he had for enabling these missions. Much of the evidence against him was deemed too sensitive to be made public, but Abu Farah, the Shin Bet officer, said that during his interrogation Barghouti had confessed to ordering the operations. “He didn’t connect the wires of the devices,” said Abu Farah, “but he was the commander. He was the leader for those people.”

But Ben Yitzhak, the Shin Bet officer who helped arrest Barghouti, was surprised at the charge sheet. True, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade was overseen by Fatah’s supreme committee, of which Barghouti was a member. But these cells were only loosely controlled, and other Fatah leaders were more directly implicated in military operations. (Barghouti himself has always denied supporting attacks on civilians inside Israel.) A little dismissively, Ben Yitzhak pointed out that Barghouti had no military background. “I never saw him as a big fighter,” he said. “He was always in politics.” Ben Yitzhak suspected the Israelis wanted to make an example of Barghouti because they felt personally betrayed by his espousal of violence. Abu Farah certainly seemed to feel this, complaining to me: “He did it after sitting with us. He was a partner.”

Barghouti was tried in a civilian court rather than the more opaque tribunals generally used for terrorism suspects. Perhaps by trying him as a common murderer, Israel hoped to make him seem less like a hero. The decision backfired: it gave Barghouti a platform, which he used to denounce the proceedings. From the moment he entered the courtroom, his hands clenched above his head as if in victory, he stole the show. His son Arab, then 13, was the only relative allowed into the gallery, and he leapt over the wooden benches to try to reach his father. Barghouti delivered a rousing speech in which he called himself a “fighter for peace for both peoples” – which prompted the judge to retort that a fighter for peace wouldn’t turn people into bombs.

For much of the two years of his trial, Barghouti was held in solitary confinement, in a cell little bigger than a photo booth. On June 6th 2004 he was summoned for sentencing. He was acquitted on 21 of the counts, but found guilty of involvement in five murders. His sentence was five life terms, plus an additional 40 years. Some still wonder whether his desire to play to the gallery cost him. “He could have got 20 years in prison. By now he would have been out,” said Sinijlawi, his former assistant. “We don’t want a symbol in prison, we want a leader.”

***

Barghouti remained in solitary confinement for several more years. In late 2005 the authorities began to let him mingle with the other inmates, possibly in the hope that he might check the growing popularity of Hamas. Once out of solitary, he turned the prison into a university, organising lectures from 9am to 5pm. “You’ve captured our bodies, not our minds,” he would say to the guards.

External examiners from universities in Israel and Palestine marked the inmates’ papers, and conducted vivas over mobile phones when possible (the prison authorities would sometimes interrupt the process as punishment). Over 1,200 inmates graduated under his programme.

Barghouti himself completed a doctoral thesis in Palestinian democracy, which his lawyer had to smuggle out one page at a time. He lectured, too, often on the books that captured his wide-ranging curiosity – the political economy of China or religious tolerance in classical Islam. Other prisoners called him “professor”.

Wardens usually allowed visitors to bring two books each time they came, but Barghouti traded other inmates’ allowances for chocolates he had bought from the prison shop. He managed to assemble a library of more than 2,000 volumes. “He loved history. He loved to read about Israelis, about the leadership,” said Yuval Bitton, who oversaw intelligence collection in prisons at the time. More recently Barghouti is said to have enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens”, a bestselling history of humanity.

Barghouti had a kind of celebrity status. Israeli politicians visited his cell. It was much harder for Palestinians to do so. If his wife wanted to see him she had to go through the arduous process of applying for a permit to enter Israel. She would get up at 5am on the appointed day, then undergo humiliating searches at checkpoints and prison gates – all for a 45-minute conversation behind glass that the authorities might cancel on a whim. For more than 20 years Barghouti’s family have seen him only in occasional glimpses.

***

In 2004 Arafat died. He had not been a particularly effective leader, but he had been a talisman for the Palestinian cause. His successor, Abbas, was a different figure. He had no background as a fighter, and his instincts were those of a cautious bureaucrat. According to one of his former ministers, he was anxious about angering the Israelis.

Under Abbas’s watch the PA started to resemble the bloated security states of the Arab world. Money donated by the Japanese government helped build a sleek compound for the presidential headquarters. Inside were barracks for Abbas’s 2,800-strong bodyguard and a helipad. Abbas acquired a private jet, but since his realm had no airstrip he was obliged to keep it in Amman.

Abbas hasn’t been associated with as much corruption as some Arab leaders, but for Palestinians struggling in refugee camps his life seemed a world away from theirs. “We’ve seen so little of him he might as well be in prison with Barghouti,” said one Palestinian journalist in Ramallah.

Barghouti had always been more outspoken than most about corruption in Fatah. After Arafat died he twice toyed with the idea of running from prison as an independent candidate in Palestinian elections, but was persuaded to return to the Fatah fold both times.

In 2006 his ability to work with other blocs in Palestinian politics was urgently needed. That year Palestinians were given a chance to choose their government for the second time. Hamas won the election by a crushing majority, shocking the world. Abbas had no desire to invite the Islamists into government, but it looked undemocratic for him to ignore the result.

Barghouti was well-placed to broker a solution. The prison he was in at the time, Hadarim, had been built to house Palestine’s political elite. Its main block had 80 inmates and contained both Fatah and Hamas leaders, including Sinwar, the future mastermind of the October 7th attacks. Together with Hamas representatives, Barghouti thrashed out a programme for reconciling the two factions, checking how Israel might respond to different kinds of power-sharing arrangements by discussing the proposals with his Israeli visitors.

In May 2006 the group released a statement that came to be known as the Prisoners’ Document. It called for a national unity government and “resistance” to Israel but, crucially, only in the territories it occupied beyond the green line. The document drew up the constitutional outlines of a Palestinian state: democratic, with equal rights for all, including women, and conforming to the pre-1967 borders. With Barghouti’s encouragement, Hamas seemed finally to have accepted a two-state solution.

Abbas, desperate to re-establish authority after Hamas’s election win, accepted the first step of the Prisoners’ Document and agreed to a national unity government. It comprised Hamas, Fatah and a smattering of independents. Salam Fayyad, an economist who had worked at the International Monetary Fund, was to be the finance minister.

But opponents of working with Hamas prevailed. America helped a Fatah warlord in Gaza set up new PA battalions designed to crush the Islamists. Hamas counter-attacked and Abbas’s forces had to flee. The national unity government collapsed.

In his rump fief, Abbas became paranoid. Poll after poll showed his unpopularity. Barghouti meanwhile became so beloved that Abbas’s allies could not be seen to undermine him, however much they would have liked to, and paid the requisite lip-service to his heroism. “No one can criticise him,” said one.

***

On October 7th 2023 Hamas and other factions breached the security barrier separating southern Israel from Gaza. Their fighters stormed kibbutzim, towns and a music festival, slaughtering more than 1,100 people. It was the bloodiest day the state of Israel has ever experienced.

It responded with unparalleled ferocity, not just in Gaza but also in the jails where Palestinian prisoners were kept. According to a prisoner who was released in February, inmates of one institution were forced to strip naked, kneel down and kiss the Israeli flag before mealtimes. “The sadism made Abu Ghraib [an Iraqi prison where American forces abused inmates] look like a picnic,” said the prisoner. At least ten Palestinians have reportedly died in custody.

According to his lawyer, Barghouti himself was put in solitary confinement, at times in complete darkness. Israel’s national anthem was piped into his cell at top volume all day. His books, television and newspapers were confiscated, and food and water severely rationed – he lost 10kg. The Israeli press reported that Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s hard-right security minister, suspended a prison guard for giving Barghouti food. The Israeli authorities say that Barghouti and other prisoners have been treated according to the law.

Barghouti’s wife and spokesperson, Fadwa, stopped speaking to journalists. “I don’t want to say anything to provoke anyone because I don’t want to put him in danger,” she told me in the only interview she has given since the start of the war in Gaza. “I’m very worried about his life.”

In recent weeks the families of the Israeli hostages in Gaza have stepped up their campaign for a prisoner swap. Some have protested outside Netanyahu’s home. Even as it tries to crush Barghouti, the Israeli security establishment is having to grapple with what his freedom might mean for Israel.

Shitreet, the former justice minister, is convinced that Barghouti’s release would be in Israel’s interests. “If it would depend on me, I would release him, I would pardon him and give him the possibility really to be a leader and arrive at a Palestinian state, living in peace with Israel,” he said.

Abu Farah can’t make up his mind. “He would be a very good leader, he is very clever, he is very intelligent,” he said. “I think that we could make peace with such a leader.” Then he backtracked. “We don’t trust them. How can you choose somebody that was a terrorist to be the president of the Palestinian people?”

Fadwa said that her husband still believes in the two-state solution, and that this fact was inconvenient for Israelis who wanted to dismiss him. “The Israelis would prefer someone who says ‘we don’t want Israel’,” she told me.

The question is what he might be willing to do to achieve a Palestinian state. Opinions differ on this. Some Palestinian journalists say he now espouses non-violent resistance alone. Others, including the manager of the campaign for his release, Ahmed Ghneim, reckon he thinks violence is necessary under certain circumstances. “We’re not being occupied by soft power. It’s brutal occupation by force,” said Ghneim.

One Western diplomat who has exchanged messages with Barghouti said he has prescribed strict limits on militant activity, for instance, not targeting women and children and not conducting operations outside “the area of occupation”.

What is clear is that Barghouti is less inclined than Abbas to wait patiently to be handed a state. In 2016 a political ally unveiled papers smuggled from prison which he claimed contained Barghouti’s plans. They hinged on mass disobedience.

According to the papers, Palestinians should march in their hundreds of thousands on Jerusalem, the settlements and Israeli army posts, with young and old people in the front line. The occupation’s infrastructure – its walls, road-blocks, checkpoints and electricity pylons should be destroyed. Sure, the Israeli army might open fire. But, said Ghneim, “You can’t get your liberation for free. Abbas is afraid of the price.

***

The past nine months have been deadly for Palestinians in the West Bank as well as those in Gaza. In the aftermath of October 7th, the Israeli army has been carrying out raids in its towns and cities, while settler violence has increased. Around 500 Palestinians have been killed.

When I went to Kobar, Israeli soldiers had recently pulled down the poster of Barghouti from the billboard in the village square. Nonetheless, when the intelligence officer visited his brother Moukbil in January he behaved with exceptional friendliness. At the end of their conversation the officer saluted Moukbil as “the brother of the future leader of Palestine”.

Up the road in Ramallah, I saw Abbas’s supporters gathered in restaurants beneath clouds of sheesha smoke, gaming out what they would do if Barghouti got out. What, if buoyed by the celebrations, he led the crowds to march on Abbas’s compound? “There will be a Palestinian civil war,” predicted a Fatah security chief, staring glumly into his coffee cup.

Officially, Abbas’s aides told me that Barghouti would have a “very important” role in the PA were he to be freed. But the current leader seems to be in no hurry to get his potential successor out of prison. Those close to the hostage negotiations said Abbas urged Qatari mediators to remove Barghouti’s name from the list of prisoner exchanges.

There is a reason that Hamas wants him released, apart from the prestige it would bring them. They see Barghouti as crucial to their political survival in post-war Palestine. A veteran Western diplomat thinks that Barghouti could broker a deal whereby the Islamists become members of a national unity government in exchange for recognising the state of Israel.

There is something bizarre about all the plotting going on around a man no one has seen for so long. Nelson Mandela emerged from his decades in prison wiser and more self-disciplined. No one knows what kind of transformation Barghouti has undergone. Most visits were cut off in 2016. Even his wife has not seen him for more than a year.

Bitton, the Israeli prison-intelligence officer, suggested that the Barghouti he knew in jail was less impressive than the icon whom Palestinians celebrate. He didn’t muck in with ordinary prisoners the way that Sinwar did. “He thought he was the big figure of Fatah. He always says he’s number one,” said Bitton. He added that Barghouti’s influence with other prisoners was quite limited.

Even if Barghouti doesn’t disappoint Palestinians, they might disappoint him. How many would heed him if he called for a march on Jerusalem now – especially given the greater tolerance that the Israeli army has shown for Palestinian casualties since October 7th? “People are with the movement in their hearts but with the company in their pockets,” said one Palestinian journalist, referring to the network of patronage through which the PA maintains its power.

For all his popularity, Barghouti lacks a base. His Tanzim are now led by an Abbas loyalist. “He essentially has no organisation,” said Shikaki, the pollster.

But for the peaceniks, there’s no one else who has Barghouti’s potential. “I don’t know if he’s Mandela, but he’s Barghouti, and he will be our partner in negotiations,” said Haim Oron, a former Israeli cabinet minister. “He spoke about the right of the Palestinians, and when I spoke about the right of Jews, he understood.”

Barghouti’s allies told me he has resisted the urge to despise his enemies, even after all these years of war and incarceration. “He wasn’t driven by hatred and revenge. He was purpose-driven,” said Qadura Fares, a former adviser. “He always knew that even with two states we both have to find a way of living in this bit of land together.”

ILLUSTRATIONS : DEBORAH STEVENSON

SOURCE IMAGES: GETTY, NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE, BRIDGEMAN, REUTERS

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