Christianity Today September 21, 2026 10 min signal 2026-09-21

The Palestinian Christian stuck in Israeli prison

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

September 21, 2026

- Facebook

- X

- WhatsApp

- Telegram

Shauna Clinton / Contributor / Getty

Around 1 a.m. on June 2, the Israeli military showed up at a six-story apartment building in Ramallah in the West Bank and started smashing down doors, looking for college student Natalie Abudayyeh.

On the fourth floor, Natalie and her two roommates, all of whom attended Birzeit University, got dressed after an older woman in the building texted them to say she saw the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) coming. When they broke down their door, an IDF officer asked each college student her name. When he reached 21-year-old Natalie, he compared her to a picture in his file and asked for her father’s name.

“Samer,” she said.

Thanks for signing up.

Explore more newsletters—don’t forget to start your free 60-day trial of CT to get full access to all articles in every newsletter.

Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.

The officer responded, “We are here for you.”

When Natalie heard this, she thought he was joking. “That’s silly,” she said, laughing. She gave the officer her iPhone and her password, telling him that if he found anything suspicious on her phone, they could take her. An hour later, a contact of one of Natalie’s roommates, who had Samer’s number, called him to tell him the IDF had arrested his daughter.

“We’ve been living this nightmare for the past 85 days, and we don’t know when it will end,” Samer, a pharmacist in Beit Jala, told CT in late August.

The IDF said Natalie and three other Palestinian women arrested that day were suspected of “promoting terrorist activities and additional terrorist-related activities,” according to The Times of Israel. Samer says the prosecution claims she was on the committee of a student magazine associated with Al-Qutub, a left-wing student group affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which Israel designates a terrorist organization.

Samer denies these claims. He describes Natalie, his fourth of five children, as a quiet girl focused on studying, spending time with her family, listening to music, and playing soccer. Formerly the captain of the national Palestinian women’s team, Natalie often traveled internationally for matches. Samer said his daughter isn’t associated with any political group, as he raised his children to stay away from politics. In his experience, political involvement and violent resistance do not help the Palestinian cause.

“If you want to stay resilient in your country and defend it,” he told his children, “defend it with your brains: with this”—he points to his head—“not with this”—he lifts his fist.

Samer says the Abudayyeh’s lawyer is working to make a plea bargain with the prosecution before Natalie’s sixth court hearing, scheduled for September 23.

Natalie is one of eight Palestinian Christians held in Israeli prisons, where prisoners are often under inhumane conditions and barred from communication with their families. Unlike Israeli settlers living in the West Bank, who are tried in civilian courts, Palestinian civilians in the same area are tried in military courts.

Human Rights Watch said these separate systems breed discrimination and unequal treatment. For example, an arrested Israeli must appear before a judge within 24 hours, while a Palestinian might not stand in a courtroom until up to eight days after arrest—and then before a military judge.

The group notes that Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank “are tried in different courts under different laws with different due process rights and face different sentences for the same offense. The result is a large and growing number of Palestinians imprisoned without basic due process.”

In September 2026, Israeli prisons held around 9,300 Palestinians on security grounds—including Natalie—according to the Israel Prison Service (IPS). Of these, only 1,500 have been tried. About 3,175 inmates are in administrative detention, a policy that allows Israel to detain individuals who have not committed offenses on the assumption that they will break the law in the future.

Prisoners under administrative detention are held for renewable periods of six months without standard legal proceedings and do not have access to the evidence against them. Notably, in 2025, the number of non-Palestinians held in administrative detention never exceeded 54 persons.

“We are incredibly disturbed by the reality that Natalie now joins the thousands of Palestinians in Israeli detention without charge or trial,” wrote Imad Haddad, bishop of the Abudayyehs’ denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, in a June statement. He called for the end of an unjust Israeli detention system that “paralyzes and destroys Palestinian communities.”

Since Natalie’s arrest, IPS has denied Samer and his wife phone calls and visits to Damon Prison in Haifa, where Natalie is held. During her hearings, he or Natalie’s mother has gone to the courthouse in Ramallah to observe the proceedings by video call. He can see and hear Natalie—handcuffed, answering questions in a courtroom in the Damon Prison facility. But she can’t hear or even see him unless the judge allows Samer to approach the camera.

Israeli authorities have also denied visits to a local pastor closely connected to the Abudayyeh family, though he begged them to allow him to give Natalie Communion and pray with her.

The pastor—to whom CT granted anonymity, as he faces active Israeli surveillance for his vocal criticism of Israeli policies on social media—noted that the US rarely rebukes Israel even as its leaders openly support expanding its territory to create Greater Israel, ongoing land grabs and settlement construction in the West Bank, and mass emigration from Gaza.

“That’s why they were able to detain a Christian woman … because no one is able to tell them, ‘You don’t have the right,’” he said. “Everyone is telling them, ‘Go ahead with God’s blessing. You are the chosen people, and God is with you.’”

Fadi Diab, pastor of two Anglican churches in West Bank’s Ramallah governorate, says Israel’s arrest and detention policies intentionally sow fear and anxiety in the Palestinian community. These policies deprive individuals of their freedom of expression by clamping down on university student groups and training communities never to question those in power, he says. After someone is arrested, legal fees often cripple the detainee’s family. He says IPS does not always inform families where their loved ones are held and often denies visits and phones calls.

Authorities would not allow Diab to visit one of his parishioners, 26-year-old Layan Nasir, during her three consecutive incarcerations since 2021. Two of these imprisonments were administrative detentions, while one carried a formal charge of involvement with Al-Qutub, the student group at Birzeit University.

During Nasir’s first imprisonment, which lasted several months, Diab says the IPS denied her a Bible. Though they granted her one during her second detainment, authorities gave her access to the Bible during only the final weeks of her most recent detention.

“As her priest, I couldn’t support her in prison, her family couldn’t be of support to her, [so] she found support and encouragement in reading the Bible,” Diab said.

After her release in May, Nasir told the Haifa-based news site Arab48 about the suffering prisoners in Damon Prison face, including continual searches, forced midnight room changes, beatings from prison guards, insufficient food, and a lack of feminine sanitary products.

Recent reports have highlighted worsening conditions for Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Israeli human rights organization B’tselem called the prisons “torture camps.” Relying on previously documented data and new interviews with former prisoners, the report describes systematic abuse, withheld medical care, and physical and psychological abuse. It also provides testimonies from prisoners who witnessed or experienced sexual abuse from prison guards. At the time of its publication in January, 84 Palestinians had died in Israeli detention since October 7, 2023.

“The policy of abuse is declared, deliberate, and is coming from the very top,” B’tselem wrote, noting that far-right national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir has praised inhumane prison conditions, including remarking that he is “proud that we have succeeded in reducing the terrorists’ prison conditions to the bare minimum.”

While the Palestinian people in general are facing very difficult times, prisoners suffer even more because they are hidden from the world, Nasir said in the Arab48 interview. She called on prisoners’ rights organizations to continue demanding the improvement of their “unbearable conditions.”

“Just knowing that there is attention or work being done toward improving conditions is enough, because it lets [prisoners] know there’s an outside world … that knows what they’re going through,” Nasir said in the interview.

Hind Shraydeh, a Jerusalem-based journalist and human rights defender, noted that Muslim and Christian Palestinians are treated equally poorly in Israeli prisons. Through her initiative Mahd al-Mashreq, Shraydeh keeps track of Palestinian Christians in prison. Every Easter and Christmas, her small group of volunteers creates a brochure with their names, photographs, stories, and the number of Christian holidays they have spent apart from their families. Since she can’t visit the prisoners themselves, she visits their families. She noted some local churches are too afraid to do even that.

Shraydeh says most Palestinians, herself included, consider all Palestinian prisoners “hostages.” Those convicted are charged under laws created by Israel, a foreign state, rather than the Palestinian Authority. They’re usually detained in Israel proper rather than the occupied Palestinian territories, a civilian transfer practice that violates international law.

Shraydeh longs to see Palestine’s liberation, which she defines as equality and justice for all Palestinians alongside the end of Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. She sees Jesus’ example as foundational to the liberation theology Mahd al-Mashreq promotes.

“I see Jesus as a very radical person, a very courageous person, and he fought against the Roman Empire,” she said. “We’re the same thing. We’re fighting because we’re under occupation. Full stop. And we want to live.”

Until Natalie’s hearing on September 23, Samer lives on scraps of information he gets from prisoners released from Damon. He knows that her cell, which she shares with seven other women, has three bunk beds and two mattresses on the floor, a window, and a bathroom with a toilet but no shower. He knows an outbreak of scabies is moving through the prison but doctors do not treat those infected or distribute medications.

He knows Natalie reads the Bible every day—though sometimes guards confiscate holy books for two or three days when they want to punish inmates. He’s even received messages from her by way of released prisoners, encouraging him not to worry about her.

“She’s very well-liked in prison,” Samer said. “All the girls that come out say, ‘God bless her, she’s very nice. Thank you for bringing her up like this. She’s very quiet, very nice, very kind, very helpful—but very sad.’”

Samer says both he and his wife have lost weight since Natalie’s detention, and sleep is difficult. Though their oldest son can operate the family’s pharmacy alone, Samer still goes to work every day to distract himself.

“Every morning, I wake up, I pray, I open the curtain,” he said. “Maybe she’ll be coming home, walking up the driveway. And before I go to sleep—before I lock the doors—I look down the street. Maybe she found a ride, she’s coming home.”

- More from Heather M. Surls

- Facebook

- X

- WhatsApp

- Telegram

### Palestinian Christians Prepare for Easter amid War and Settler Violence

Heather M. Surls

### Shrinking Palestinian Christian Population Wary of Cease-Fire

Heather M. Surls

### The Christian and Jewish Israelis Protecting West Bank Palestinians

Jill Nelson

### Egyptian Christians Show ‘Love of Jesus’ to Displaced Palestinians