The Israeli occupation authorities on Sunday freed Hatem Qafisha, a member of the Legislative council after a protracted  administrative detention in Israeli concentration camps and dungeons.

The “administrative detention” is often referred to as open-ended incarceration without charge or trial and is primarily meant as a reprisal against Palestinian political activists.

Israel rounded up Qafisha and most other Islamist lawmakers in the mid-2006, giving them hefty prison sentences ranging from 35 months to 48 months for taking part in elections under the umbrella of a militant organization.

The Israeli occupation authorities arrested Qafisha numerous times the last of which occurred in November 2007. All in all, Qafisha spent more than 9 years in detention.

He was never accused of any concrete charges apart from generalized and concocted  charges pertaining to resisting the Israeli occupation and identifying with a militant organization.

In an interview three years ago, Qafisha intimated that he pressed the Jewish military judge to inform him why he was arrested.

The Judge said he couldn’t tell him because the evidence was secret. Then Qafisha confronted the judge, saying, “then how do you expect me to refrain from committing the same violation again if I don’t know what it is?”

During his prolonged imprisonment, Qafisha was able to earn his Ph.D. in political science by correspondence. His dissertation is titled “the erosion of the Israeli deterrence.”

Several Islamic detainees have also been able to earn Master and doctorate degrees through correspondence.

Qafisha joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world’s largest Islamic political movement, in 1978.  In 1991, he was deported to southern Lebanon along with more than 400 Islamic political activists.

Then Israel’s Prime Minister Isaac Rabin thought that the draconian measure would weaken Hamas and stop the resistance against the Israeli occupation.

However, the deportation seemed to have significantly strengthened Hamas, prompting Rabin to step up autonomy talks with the PLO leadership under the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

In 2006, Qafisha won a seat in the Palestinian legislative elections while languishing in Israeli custody.

Qafisha was also briefly arrested by the Palestinian autonomous authority.

Abu Anas (his nom de guerre) is considered a prominent civic leader in the al-Khalil District who played an active role in the creation and management of charitable organizations in the city.

Qafisha, 47, is father to eight children.