On Friday, November 24 at the earliest, Marah Bakir will go home. The name of the 23-year-old woman was one of the first agreed on by Israel and Hamas when they sealed the exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners that could begin on Friday, thanks to a ceasefire lasting between four and ten days. The first list of thirty-three names was sent by Israel on Wednesday to the Palestinian Prisoners' Club, which represents so-called "security" detainees in Israeli prisons.

Bakir was sent to one of these detention centers on October 12, 2015. At the age of 15, after a school day like any other, she had crossed the expressway that straddles the old border between East and West Jerusalem in her high school uniform. The border is in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, where she crossed to reach the outskirts of the Border Police headquarters, the main military occupying force in the Palestinian half of the Holy City. It was the dark days known as the "knife intifada."

Palestinians, often young, with no connection to any political organization, tried one after the other to stab a soldier, a settler or a civilian. Jerusalem, with its open borders and omnipresent military control apparatus, was the capital of this uprising of anonymous people. Bakir's mother, Sawsan Bakir, claims that the teenager was shot several times in the left arm on the sidewalk that day. She never dared ask Bakir, a frail brunette with a determined look, what she had tried to accomplish there. A judge sentenced her to eight years in prison for the attempted murder of a border policeman.

Low-key festivities

Since Thursday, November 23, Sawsan Bakir has been preparing her daughter's room – untouched for eight years, with its bed covered in teddy bears – in the apartment they rent on the ground floor of an old stone house in the rather middle-class Beit Hanina neighborhood. While waiting for the big day of his daughter's return, her father worked overtime in Ramallah on the West Bank. After Bakir's arrest, he lost his job as head of sales at an Israeli cake factory.

These non-political parents are finding out how the 1,000 Palestinian prisoners released in 2011 in exchange for the lone Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit had been released at West Bank border crossings. They are planning low-key festivities, "out of respect for the other prisoners, and because the war goes on in Gaza," explained Sawsan, who believes the exchanges will continue: "This is just the beginning, but bigger exchanges will come, for all the prisoners, because of what happened in Gaza. The war will empty the prisons."

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