“I felt genuinely happy for a few hours, from the depths of my heart, for the first time in two whole years,” said Maha Wafi.

On the night of October 12, Wafi and her five children could barely sleep. It had been an all-too-common problem in the two years of unrelenting Israeli attacks on Gaza since the October 7 attacks. But that night, it wasn’t the Israeli bombs keeping them awake.

Now, it was because they believed that the next day their husband and father, Anis al-Astal, would be one of thousands of Palestinians freed from Israeli prisons as part of the new ceasefire deal.

“What will he look like? What would we feed him, and what would we offer him to drink?”

“We were discussing what we should do when Baba comes. What will he look like? What would we feed him, and what would we o

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