When we arrived at the family apartment in Ramallah on her first day of freedom, Bushra Tavel was enjoying her morning coffee and looking forward to lunch.

“In prison, it was just hummus, hummus, hummus. Now, I can eat something different,” she joked.

In the kitchen, family and friends hugged her, and her mother watched from the table, happy that her only daughter was finally home as a ceasefire in Gaza saw Hamas begin releasing hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Sunday in an Israeli prison.

The 32-year-old journalist spent more than five years in Israeli prisons on multiple occasions.

She has been held without charge, most recently since March 2024, except for one time when she was charged for speaking at a mosque.

“I’m a journalist,” she said, “and I have the right to express my opinion.”

This is not the first time Bushra al-Tawil has been involved in a prisoner exchange.

In 2011, she was released along with 1,000 other Palestinian prisoners as part of an agreement to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held hostage in Gaza for more than five years.

She was quickly rearrested by Israeli forces shortly after the agreement was reached.

During multiple arrests, she said she was beaten, shot in the leg and had a cigarette stubbed out on her back.

She said she was humiliated by guards every day in prison.

“The worst thing is not being allowed to wear the hijab,” she said.

“When we first entered the prison, I was forced to strip naked.”

Israel’s prison service said all prisoners were treated in accordance with the law.

The bespectacled young journalism graduate is a conservative Muslim.

On the living room wall hangs a photo of her father, Jamal al-Tawil, a prominent Hamas politician in the occupied West Bank.

He is the former head of al-Bireh village outside Ramallah. He has spent more than 19 years in Israeli prisons.

I asked Bushra if he supports Hamas.

“I don’t want to be arrested again,” she declined to answer.

I also asked her if she had any sympathy for the three Israeli hostages, young women like herself who were released Sunday from Hamas captivity in Gaza for more than a year.

“We have to go home and they have to go home,” she said.

“Hostage means I’m out. As long as there are hostages, prisoners like me will be free.”

The first phase of the ceasefire deal is expected to see the release of another 30 hostages in exchange for some 1,800 Palestinian prisoners.

Some of the prisoners were convicted of more serious crimes, including multiple murders.

They may be expelled from Israel and the Palestinian territories to countries such as Qatar and Türkiye.

But all of the Palestinians released on Sunday, including several children, had been convicted of relatively minor crimes.

Many, like Bushra, have not been charged at all and are being held in Israeli prisons in so-called “administrative detention,” a practice that has been strongly condemned by human rights groups.

The Israeli military has argued that for security reasons it often cannot disclose details of the charges people face, even to detainees and their lawyers, to avoid revealing the identities of informants.