Mahmoud al-Ardah: Freedom Tunnel architect and enduring icon of the Palestinian struggle
“The word you speak is like a rocket being launched. And the word hurts more than the rocket.”
One of the most fascinating recent episodes of Palestinian defiance against the Israeli occupation was the Freedom Tunnel operation of September 2021. Six Palestinians serving long sentences in Gilboa Prison, one of the most notorious Israeli rape-and-torture dungeons, dug a 100-metre tunnel using their bare hands and spoons over ten months to escape to freedom.
All six were ultimately caught within days, but the news of their escape was exhilarating. It shocked the Israelis and excited the Palestinians for the possibility that it presented: that the occupation’s dungeons were not impenetrable, that freedom could be won with patience, perseverance, and ingenuity.
Mahmoud al-Ardah was the brains and the architect of the operation. After his re-arrest, when Mahmoud was presented before an illegitimate kangaroo court of the occupation, he had a message for his people: “We wanted to tell the nation that this monster is an illusion of dust.”
He recently revealed that even an occupation prison official was impressed by the ingenuity of the Freedom Tunnel operation. “One of the officers sympathised with me and liked the idea,” Mahmoud told Al Jazeera. “I believe that man was later dismissed.”
Born in 1975, Mahmoud became active in the resistance as a boy during the First Intifada in 1987 and was abducted by the occupation for the first time as a 16-year-old in 1992 on allegations of targeting occupation jeeps and military patrols with Molotov cocktails. Despite his youth, Mahmoud was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was eventually released in 1996. However, he had become a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad during his prison stint. He would be free for a mere eight months before being arrested again by the occupation on charges of shooting a military officer invading Salfit and harbouring the martyred leader Saleh Tahaineh, who had himself escaped from the occupation’s dungeons.
Mahmoud would go on to attempt prison escapes in 2001, 2011, and 2013 before succeeding in 2021.
He recounted the Freedom Tunnel experience in a recent interview:
I was not afraid and I did not hesitate to dig the Freedom Tunnel in Gilboa Prison in 2021. I had a previous attempt in 2013, but my plan was discovered and I did not succeed. So I thought about it again without hesitation. What prompted me to do that was that when I went out to the courtyard outside the prison cell, we had limits that we did not cross, but I saw my shadow outside those limits. Therefore, my freedom has no limits and there are no restrictions on it. My mind was not restricted, and I tried again and succeeded in that, and I was able to break my chains for a week. This encounter with the sky and the sun is very wonderful.
Already serving a life sentence in the Israeli dungeons before the 2021 escape, Mahmoud’s prison conditions worsened after his re-arrest.
He would endure four more years before the resistance won his freedom as part of the Flood of the Free deal in October. Despite being free, Mahmoud, who comes from the West Bank town of Arraba in Jenin, cannot go home. Considered too dangerous to be allowed to roam free in Palestine, he has instead been exiled to Egypt by the Israelis.
Gentle, calm, and erudite, Mahmoud immersed himself in books during his three decades of incarceration, studying history, philosophy, politics, and religion. He completed his education, and has written a 1,200-page novel, which he says is “now in its final stages of development.”
Mahmoud has given a number of interviews in the short time he has been free. It’s as if he wants to make up for the time the occupation stole from him, imprisoning him for 32 years, more than two-thirds of his life.
Soon after his arrival in Egypt, Mahmoud was seen savouring home-made cheese from Arraba with a spoon for the first time in four years, after the Israelis had banned him from using the humble cutlery due to his demonstrated ability to fashion it into a weapon of liberation.
Having been subjected to extreme brutality and years of solitary confinement in Israeli dungeons, Mahmoud was, while walking in a Cairene neighbourhood, gripped by the sight of children for the first time in decades. He stopped to talk to them and to appreciate the gentleness we take for granted.
Talking about how those incarcerated saw the Al-Aqsa Flood and its aftermath, Mahmoud recalled being deeply moved by the solidarity of the Yemenis, who continued to attack the genocidal Israelis in support of the Palestinian resistance despite their meagre resources.
In Ben-Gvir’s sadistic dungeons, Mahmoud and his fellow inmate were brutally beaten for composing a few lines praising Yemeni solidarity. “It was the first time I heard that the Yemenis were standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people and fighting,” he recalled. “I felt deep sorrow — that struggling Yemen, which has so few resources, was striking Israel. So I improvised a few words in praise of Yemen. When they heard them, a force came in — they stormed into my cell and my brother Muammar al-Shahrouri’s cell. They beat us both severely, all of them took turns. They tried hard to kill me and Muammar — because we were speaking together. But by the grace of God Almighty, He saved us from them.”
The freedom of Mahmoud and nearly 2,000 other detainees in October, and of thousands more during the prisoner exchanges in March this year, was a result of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation undertaken by the resistance in Gaza. During the ongoing genocide that the Israelis are carrying out in the aftermath of the Flood, they have also incarcerated thousands of Palestinians from Gaza.
“Death is easier than prison because one dies and finds peace, but in prison, one dies every day,” Mahmoud reflected, describing the inhumanity that the Palestinians are subjected to in Israeli dungeons. “One’s freedom and humanity are taken away.”
Elsewhere, he said that “In the last two years, I suffered more than in the previous 30.”
Despite such barbarism, the bravery of the Palestinians from Gaza stood out to Mahmoud:
But the Gazans were strong and resilient; we have never seen fighters like them in history. What impressed me most about the Gazan prisoners was their strength and determination to live. I remember one prisoner from Gaza entering a waiting room in the prison and drawing a rifle, then signing his name next to it. No one else would dare do that because we knew the soldiers would beat or kill anyone who wrote anything on the walls. Also, on their last day in prison, when the Gazans learned of their impending release, they were dancing the Dabke (a traditional Palestinian dance). I consider them very strong and unique.
As the Israelis continue their genocide in Gaza via sustained killing campaigns and by depriving the genocide survivors of the resources to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves under unspeakable circumstances made worse by winter rains, Mahmoud recently gave a message to a group of students that we should all pay heed to.
All the more so as Israel’s vice-like grip on the Palestinian narrative has rapidly loosened over the past two years of gratuitous violence, and its desperation is reflected in the pace with which its proxies are busy buying media firms and silencing anti-genocide voices.
“The role you play as students, it’s the same role that the resistance plays,” Mahmoud said. “The word you speak is like a rocket being launched. And the word hurts more than the rocket.”
Read the story of Mahmoud’s fellow Freedom Tunnel participant, Zakaria Zubeidi: An extraordinary lineage of resistance
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THANK YOU for this uplifting piece -- for me anyway. I view it against the backdrop of the film "The Encampments", which I watched yesterday. What moved me was the fact that Gazans knew about Columbia and some of the other pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist university encampments. I won't be revealing much by telling you that at the end of the documentary, the filmmakers show clips of Gazan children holding up signs in English saying. "Thank you Columbia". So all those protesting students, Mahmoud Khalil et al., it wasn't all for nothing. They received the love in Gaza.
I am so happy to see Mahmoud al-Ardah out of prison! Thank you so much for reporting his story! And thank you so much Yemen for being a true friend of Palestine!