The BBCOn her first day of freedom, Bushra al-Tawil was enjoying her morning coffee and looking forward to lunch when we arrived at the family apartment in Ramallah.
“In prison it was just hummus, hummus, hummus. Now I can have something different,” she joked.
There were hugs from family members and friends in the kitchen, her mother sat at the table and watched, happy that her only daughter was finally home as a result of the Gaza ceasefire agreement that saw Hamas release hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners through Israeli prisons on Sunday.
The 32-year-old journalist spent more than five years in Israeli prisons at different times.
She has always been held without charge, most recently since March 2024, except on one occasion when she was prosecuted for a speech she gave at a mosque.
“I am a journalist, she said. I have a right to express myself.”
ReutersThis is not the first time Bushra al-Taweel has been part of a prisoner exchange.
In 2011 she was released along with 1,000 other Palestinian prisoners as part of a deal to free Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who had been held hostage in Gaza for more than five years.
Shortly after this deal, she was quickly arrested again by Israeli forces.
She said that during her various arrests she was severely beaten, threatened with being shot in the leg and had an unlit cigarette on her back.
In prison, she said, she was humiliated every day by guards.
“The worst part was that they wouldn't let me wear my headscarf,” she said.
“And when we first entered the prison, they made me strip naked.”
Israel's prison service said all prisoners were treated according to the law.
ReutersThe bespectacled young journalism graduate is a conservative Muslim.
On the wall in the living room is a photo of her father, Jamal al-Tawil, a prominent Hamas politician in the occupied West Bank.
He is the former mayor of the village of al-Bireh, just outside Ramallah. He spent more than 19 years in an Israeli prison.
I asked Bushra if he supported Hamas.
“I don't want to be arrested again,” she said, declining to answer.
I also asked if she had any sympathy for the three Israeli hostages, young women like her who were freed from more than a year of captivity by Hamas in Gaza on Sunday.
“We need to come home and they need to come home,” she said.
“The hostages meant I got away. As long as there are hostages, prisoners like me will get their freedom.”
ReutersThirty more Israeli hostages are expected to be released in the first phase of the ceasefire agreement in exchange for around 1,800 more Palestinian prisoners.
Some of these inmates have been convicted of much more serious crimes, including multiple murders.
They will likely be deported out of Israel and the Palestinian territories to countries such as Qatar and Turkey.
But all the Palestinians released on Sunday, including several children, were convicted of relatively minor crimes.
Many, like Bushra, have not been charged at all and have been held in Israeli prisons under so-called “administrative detention,” a process strongly condemned by human rights groups.
The Israeli military says it often cannot reveal details of the charges people face, even to detainees and their lawyers, for security reasons to avoid revealing the identities of informants.