His mother told the judge to give her son twenty life sentences. Mariam, known as Um Ayham, was sitting in an Israeli occupation court the day her eldest son, Ayham Kamamji, was being sentenced, watching the years pile up, forty for one charge, twenty for another, life upon life, until the count reached two life sentences. When the judge finished, she stood, in a room where speaking is forbidden, and told him her son should do more to their likes; brutal colonizer oppressors. Her son recalls the moment as the day she seemed to defy the whole of Israel to its face, the same woman whose voice with him was only ever soft. Kamamji was 19 when he was taken by Israeli occupation forces in 2006 and held under two life sentences. His mother died in 2019, while he was kept from her, denied even the right to attend her funeral. Two years later he became one of the six hostages who dug their way out of the high security Gilboa prison with spoons in the escape Palestinians call the Freedom Tunnel, and he later said part of what pulled him was the wish to stand at her grave. He was recaptured after weeks on the run. He never reached it back then. He walked free on 13 October 2025, released after nearly two decades in Israeli prisons in the exchange under the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire, when the resistance traded 20 living Israeli prisoners for 1,968 Palestinian hostages, 250 of them serving life terms. Only then, finally home, could he go to her. @MetrasWebsite kamamjy20 (IG)
