The Unbroken Chain: Faith, Family, and Resistance in the Life of Hamas Prisoner Bahij Badr

Introduction: An Emblematic Figure

Bahij Muhammad Mahmoud Badr is a long-serving Hamas prisoner and former cadre of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades whose trajectory—from village activist and accountant to underground organizer, then to life-sentenced prisoner and prison intellectual—has become emblematic within the contemporary Palestinian prisoners’ movement. A cluster of Palestinian journalistic, rights-advocacy, and movement media—especially the Asra Media Office (Maktab Iʿlām al-Asrā), the Palestinian online forum “Shabakat Filasṭīn lil-Ḥiwār” (Paldf), and the pan-Arab site Arab48—underscore Badr as both a key participant in early-2000s Hamas armed activity around Ramallah and, later, as an exemplary figure among “old guard” prisoners serving multiple life sentences, whose family and body are continually targeted across decades of conflict [1].

Early Life and Social Formation

Arab48’s profile of prisoners from the village of Bayt Liqya notes that “the two brother prisoners, Bahir Badr, 36 years old, and Bahij Badr, 39 years old, were arrested on 27 July 2004,” and that at that time Bahij, a father of three, “worked as an accountant in the headquarters of the Zakat Committee in the city of Ramallah for five years.” [2]. Combining this with the age given in later prisoner-support reporting—that he is fifty in 2025—places his birth around 1974 in Bayt Liqya, west of Ramallah [1].

A long narrative profile published in 2009 on Paldf—signed by Ḏiyāʾ al-Ṭawīl and widely recirculated in prisoner-solidarity circles—offers the richest account of his early life and political formation. It describes a family marked by the loss of the father and by repeated hardship, where the siblings struggled to complete their education and establish their own families in the absence of a paternal provider [3]. Within this setting, the article portrays Badr as unusually sensitive and emotionally affected by images of martyrs and assassinations, weeping intensely when a young man from his village, Karīm Mufārja, was killed during an attack in Nablus, and again upon the assassinations of Hamas founder Shaykh Aḥmad Yāsīn and of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Rantīsī. This emotional disposition is coupled to intense religious commitment: his wife, Umm ʿUmar, recalls that he “carried the concern of calling to God and to jihad in His path,” and that, despite working as an accountant, he possessed a solid grounding in Islamic sciences through exhaustive reading, maintaining a substantial personal library at home [3].

Alongside his work and religious activities, Badr emerges in these sources as a figure of local social capital in Bayt Liqya. He is remembered as a karate trainer who founded a sports club in the village, a daily runner and disciplined organizer of his time, and an attentive relative and friend who refused to neglect wider kinship networks despite an overfull schedule [3]. Arab48 confirms that he was simultaneously a salaried accountant, a husband, and a father of three young children at the time of his arrest—Imān, then three and a half; ʿUmar, two; and the newborn Jumān, whose infancy would later become a recurring motif in family narratives of separation [2].

Transition to Clandestine Armed Activity

The same Paldf profile situates Badr’s transition from public religious activism to clandestine armed activity in January 2001. At that point, he met Shaykh Ṣāliḥ Dar Mūsā (“Abū Islām”), also from Bayt Liqya, whom the article credits with helping to establish a particularly lethal Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades cell in the Ramallah area, later known as the “Bayt Liqya cell.”

According to Dar Mūsā’s own retrospective letter cited in the piece, he selected Badr for this work because he was “a man committed to Islam, possessing a brilliant mind and an alert intellect, and endowed with a high security sense.” On this basis, Badr was tasked with heading the cell’s explosives and bomb-making unit and was trained intensively in the use of weapons, marksmanship, and advanced security practices, including how to withstand interrogation and resist the tactical tricks of Shabak/Shin Bet [3].

Structure and Operations of the Bayt Liqya Cell

Within this underground structure, Badr is credited with recruiting and organizing a multi-layered network. He reportedly brought into the fold his close friend Naṣrī ʿĀṣī and, through him, his own younger brother Bahir, who was then working and living inside the 1948 territories and whose familiarity with those areas made him useful for reconnaissance [3]. Badr then divided the clandestine structure into small, compartmentalized cells—some dedicated to target selection (he, Bahir, and Naṣrī), others to manufacturing explosive belts and devices (including Marʿī Abū Saʿīda and Muḥammad ʿUmar Ziyād)—such that each two-person nucleus knew little of the others’ activities, in an effort to minimize the damage of any future arrest. The Paldf narrative frames Badr’s choice to enlist his own brother as flowing from a conviction that jihad was an individual obligation that “no Muslim should delay,” casting this intra-family recruitment as an expression both of ideological commitment and of fraternal grief [3].

The same sources tie this cell to a sequence of Qassam operations in Jerusalem and central Palestine during the second intifada—most notably two suicide bombings in 2003, one at Café Hillel in West Jerusalem and another at a bus stop near Tzrifin (Ṣarfand), though the Paldf account deliberately centers the internal dynamics of the cell rather than reproducing the zionist entity’s casualty claims [3]. By late 2003, Shabak arrested Shaykh Ṣāliḥ Dar Mūsā, subjecting him to months of severe interrogation; the article emphasizes that he deliberately misled interrogators and shielded the remainder of the cell for as long as possible. Ultimately, however, surveillance—specifically, cameras tracking the car used by Bahir and Naṣrī in an attempted operation at a bus stop in “Tal al-Rabīʿ” (Tel Aviv)—led the security services to identify and unravel the rest of the network [3].

Arrest and Initial Interrogation

Badr’s arrest, and the cascade of family repression that accompanied it, form a central axis of both the Paldf narrative and subsequent human-rights reporting. In the early hours of 27 July 2004, zionist occupation forces surrounded the Badr family home in Bayt Liqya and burst through the doors with explosives, despite, as his wife notes, knowing that there were small children in the house and that his mother was chronically ill [3]. Having returned early from a family wedding, Badr was woken at gunpoint in the bedroom; afterward, his wife returned to find the house devastated—doors and cupboards torn apart, the library emptied onto the floor, even the washing machine opened and the laundry searched. Before departing, the soldiers confiscated all the cash savings he had stored in the house, which he had kept outside the banking system for religious reasons. The same night, his brother Bahir was arrested in the city of al-Ramla, where he was living and preparing for his wedding scheduled less than two weeks later, while other members of the cell, including Naṣrī ʿĀṣī, were also detained [2, 3].

From the first night, Badr was transferred directly to the “Moscobiyya” (Russian Compound) interrogation center in Jerusalem, where, according to his brother Bāsim’s testimony, he was subjected to a catalogue of torture methods compiled from previous cases: prolonged shackling, stress positions, sleep deprivation, blindfolded beatings that broke teeth, and a particularly painful variant of “shabḥ” (hooding and binding on a chair at a right angle, with interrogators striking him alternately from front and back when he tilted to one side). This regime reportedly continued for days on end, with rotating teams of interrogators and explicit threats to demolish the family home and arrest his sick mother and his wife [3].

Coercive Interrogation of Family Members

The pressure extended to his closest relatives. His mother, in her mid-fifties and suffering from a serious respiratory condition requiring an inhaler, was arrested twice. The second time, soldiers told the family they would take her only for “two hours,” but she was held under interrogation for a week, during which, according to Bāsim, interrogators repeatedly denied her medication until her breathing collapsed; at such moments, they sometimes dragged her to the cell where her sons were held, or brought the brothers to see their mother struggling to breathe, as a method of psychological coercion [3]. His wife, who had undergone a difficult caesarean delivery of their youngest daughter only weeks before, was also arrested and interrogated at Moscobiyya on 29 September 2004. She recalls being questioned immediately upon arrival, while still physically weak, about her husband’s friends and routines, and being subjected to insults and threats that her husband would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if she did not cooperate. When she insisted that she knew nothing of his clandestine activities, the interrogators brought Bahij into the room in a visibly battered state, but did not allow them to communicate, releasing her only hours later [3].

Sentencing and Emergence as a Prison Intellectual

After roughly five months of interrogation, Badr and his co-defendants were tried and sentenced by the zionist entity’s military court. Arab48 reports that “after five months of interrogation, the occupation sentenced Bahij to eighteen life sentences, and Bahir to twelve life sentences,” and notes that both were then being held in Ramon prison [2]. Earlier sources had sometimes referred to fifteen life sentences, but the more recent Asra Media material consistently states that he is “sentenced to eighteen life terms” [1, 4].

Inside prison, Badr’s biography begins to intersect in a sustained way with the institutional life of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement. Asra Media’s recent profiles present him not only as a Hamas prisoner with heavy sentences but as a figure whose personal trajectory condenses several key themes of the movement: the endurance of “old guard” prisoners, the centrality of education and religious practice behind bars, and the intensifying infliction of isolation and violence after the 7 October 2023 “Tufan al-Aqsa” operation and ensuing genocide on Gaza [1].

In that October 2025 feature, the Asra Media Office introduces his family as a “model of a cohesive household shaken by the winds of tribulation yet living through its gifts,” underscoring that the story cannot be reduced simply to the repetition of life-sentencing. His wife, Umm ʿUmar, is quoted as saying that “three freedom deals have passed and Bahij had no share in them,” yet the family remain convinced that “freedom will come, even if the appointment is delayed.” She stresses that, as of late 2025, he has been imprisoned for “twenty-one years and three months,” and that his absence has not broken the family’s unity or their belief in his eventual return [1].

Educational and Religious Labor in Prison

One of the most striking aspects of Badr’s prison biography is his educational and religious labor. Asra Media reports that he has memorized the Qurʾān “with a continuous chain” (bi-l-sanad al-muttasil), and has completed both a bachelor’s degree in commerce and a master’s degree in Islamic economics from within prison, even as he encourages his wife to pursue and complete her own master’s studies under his remote guidance [4]. The same article quotes her as saying that he “never left our house for a single day” in the emotional sense: he follows each child’s studies and aspirations and, through letters and rare visits, “raises them through dialogue, not orders,” offering an affective presence that she contrasts favorably with many fathers on the outside [1].

Public Voice: Authoring Prisoners' Movement Discourse

This educational and religious profile connects directly to his role as a public voice of the prisoners’ movement. In May 2023, Asra Media published an essay titled “Umm al-Aqṣā wa-l-asrā” (“Mother of al-Aqsa and the Prisoners”) under the byline “By the prisoner: Bahij Badr,” responding to the death of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Khāḍir ʿAdnān after a prolonged hunger strike. In it, Badr reflects on why Adnān’s martyrdom seemed almost unbelievable to many Palestinians—citing the distractions of Ramadan, the repeated incursions into al-Aqsa Mosque and the subsequent rounds of confrontation, and, crucially, a dangerous normalization of hunger strikes as a tool whose urgency is only acknowledged when the prisoner is literally on the verge of death [5].

The essay then pivots to praise the armed response from Gaza—“especially the Joint Operations Room”—as evidence that the resistance in Gaza remains the “tender mother and warm embrace” of the prisoners and al-Aqsa, even amid siege and conspiracies “from near and far.” At the same time, Badr expresses bewilderment at what he sees as the muted reaction of the West Bank’s armed formations and calls on them to provide a response “befitting the rank and position of the martyred shaykh Khāḍir ʿAdnān,” insisting that the West Bank is “the spearhead capable of striking the enemy in the heart and in the head” [5]. The article closes by praying that God will enable “the mother of al-Aqsa and the prisoners”—that is, the resistance—to fulfill its promise to free the prisoners through a second “Wafāʾ al-Aḥrār 2” exchange. In the Asra Media ecosystem, such essays are typically commissioned from prisoners associated with leadership roles, suggesting that Badr functions not only as an individual lifer but as an articulating voice of the broader Hamas-aligned prisoners’ current.

Deteriorating Conditions and International Law Advocacy

By 2025, the Asra Media Office had begun to use Badr’s case as a central example in a series critiquing the erosion of international humanitarian law in the zionist entity’s prisons. In a legal-advocacy article examining the discrepancy between the Geneva Conventions and the actual treatment of Palestinian prisoners, the office notes that Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention obliges the occupying power to detain prisoners under humane conditions, yet “the prisoner Bahij Badr is held in a harsh living environment,” alongside other leaders facing deliberate medical neglect and starvation policies [6]. This dovetails with the narrative in the October 2025 profile, where Badr is described as currently held in Janot prison, having lost substantial weight due to systematic underfeeding, and where his own testimony attests to deliberate beatings and humiliations during transfers for legal visits, to the point that he asked to cancel further visits to avoid the torture associated with transit [1].

Continued Family Targeting and Symbolic Raids

Externally, Badr’s family continues to be targeted, and these incursions themselves circulate as visual and textual elements of the prisoners’ movement’s repertory. On 20–21 December 2023, in the midst of large-scale raids across the West Bank, multiple newswires and Telegram channels affiliated with Palestinian outlets such as Palestine Today, Quds Press, and the Yemen-based “Shabakat al-Yaman – Akhbār Filasṭīn Mubāshar” disseminated images captioned “the traces of destruction caused by the occupation forces after raiding the home of the prisoner Bahij Badr in the town of Bayt Liqya west of Ramallah” [7, 8]. These clips and stills, reposted by agencies such as SND, al-Kūfiyya TV, and the Yemen Palestine news feed, reinforce a familiar topology in prisoners’ movement discourse: the home as an extension of the prisoner’s besieged body, and repeated home demolitions or raids as attempts to punish and intimidate the family for his continued steadfastness [9, 10].

The Brother's Release and Allegory of Isolation

The intertwining of Badr’s biography with the fate of his brother Bahir underscores his role in the prisoners’ movement as both individual and synecdoche. Bahir, who shared in the same arrest, torture, and sentencing, remained in prison until late 2025. He was eventually freed in the “Ṭūfān al-Aḥrār 3” prisoner exchange and deported to Egypt, his story forming part of a widely circulated Al Jazeera feature on four lifers released under that deal [11]. Asra Media, however, stresses that Bahij himself “does not yet know that his brother has gained his freedom,” because since the beginning of the Gaza war he has been entirely cut off from news, denied both family and lawyer visits, and kept under an intensified isolation regimen targeting prisoners with high sentences [4].

This gap—one brother freed but inaccessible, the other still imprisoned and unaware—has been seized upon by the prisoners’ media as a compressed allegory of the broader condition of “old prisoners” and their families.

The Asra Media article closes by explicitly stating that Badr’s case “represents a model of the suffering of veteran prisoners and those with life sentences, who are isolated from the world for long years, and from whom the news of their loved ones is withheld in an attempt to break their will; yet those among them who remain steadfast continue to write their perseverance with patience, faith, and dignity” [4].

Yemeni outlets aligned with the prisoner cause, such as the Saba News Agency and the newspaper al-Thawra, picked up this narrative almost verbatim in late October 2025, highlighting his deteriorating health, the deliberate beatings he endures during transfers, and the Asra Media Office’s call for international human-rights organizations to intervene [12, 13].

Conclusion: The Archetypal Prisoner

At the micro-level of everyday prison life, Badr appears in these sources as both a subject and a producer of prisoner discourse. His authorship of “Umm al-Aqṣā wa-l-asrā” situates him within a cadre of prisoners whose writings circulate via Telegram and prisoner-support websites, shaping how solidarity activists and wider Palestinian publics interpret hunger strikes, armed responses, and the moral economy of sacrifice [5, 14]. His personal discipline—memorizing the Qurʾān, completing degrees, mentoring his children and his wife’s academic path—aligns with a broader prisoners’ movement emphasis on sumūd (steadfastness) and self-cultivation as forms of resistance to prison regimes. And the recurrent raids on his home, the repeated arrests of his mother and wife, and now the travel bans that prevent his elderly mother from even visiting her newly freed son, render his family a sort of extended front of the prisoners’ movement, where women and children absorb and reinterpret the violence aimed at male fighters [1, 3].

Bahij Badr is an archetypal figure of the Hamas prisoners’ milieu: a pious village activist who assumed a mid-level leadership role in a clandestine Qassam cell, endured systematic torture and heavy sentencing, and then, over two decades in prison, re-inscribed himself as an educator, writer, and symbol of multi-generational endurance. Because he is both a participant in and an object of the prisoners’ movement’s own media production—writing essays, being profiled in longform narratives, and having images of his ransacked home circulate across Telegram—his biography also illuminates how that movement narrates itself: emphasizing religiosity, family cohesion, education, and legal-moral claims under international humanitarian law.

Bibliography

[1] Maktab Iʿlām al-Asrā, “Bahīj Badr.. thamāniyata ʿashar muʾabbadan wa-sanawāt min al-thabāt wa-l-karāma khalf al-quḍbān,” Asra Media, 30 October 2025; retrieved online (22 November 2025): https://asramedia.ps/post/21439/بهيج-بدر..-ثمانية-عشر-مؤبداً-وسنوات-من-الثبات-والكرامة-خلف-القضبان

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[14] Maktab Iʿlām al-Asrā Telegram channel, post 29189, 6 May 2023; retrieved online (22 November 2025): https://t.me/asramediia/29189

• This article was authored by my esteemed friend, Mujamma Haraket (al‑Jamʿīyah al‑Islāmīyah) — X: @MujammaHaraket — and is published here by A.E.P., the owner of this website, with his kind permission.