Zakaria Zubeidi, a Palestinian terrorist freed in the most recent hostage deal with Hamas, told The New York Times on Tuesday, months after his release, that Palestinians should rethink the tools they use in their struggle for independence.
Once a symbol of the Palestinian fight against Israel, Zubeidi rose to prominence as commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades during the Second Intifada in 2000. He later left his terrorist ideals to run a theater, only to return to terrorism a decade later and be imprisoned.
Zakaria Zubeidi recaptured following his prison break in Israel
(Video: Aviyahu Shapira, Israel Moskovitz, Israel Police)
In 2021, he escaped Israel’s Gilboa Prison through a tunnel, was recaptured about a month later and sent back to jail. Now, the outlet reports, Zubeidi has become a symbol of something else entirely—what he calls a “sense of hopelessness” among Palestinians.
In the interview, Zubeidi described his life as a terrorist, theater director and prisoner as ultimately “futile.” None of it, he said, had advanced the creation of a Palestinian state, “and it may never do so.” He argued that Palestinians must “reconsider our tools. We founded a theater, and we tried cultural resistance — what did that do?
"We tried the rifle, we tried shooting. There’s no solution.” Zubeidi alleged that during his last imprisonment, guards broke his teeth and jaw, and that in the weeks following October 7, 2023, he was beaten repeatedly. Israel’s Prison Service denied the allegations.
He added that upon his release he found Gaza devastated by Israeli strikes, much of his hometown of Jenin destroyed and depopulated in military raids, his own home inside an Israeli military-closed zone, and his 21-year-old son killed in an airstrike on Tubas. “But what is the solution? I’m asking that question myself,” he said.
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He also reflected with irony on his shift from terrorist to theater director. “The media said Zakaria moved from armed struggle to cultural struggle, But it’s not about being one thing or another. How did I open the theater door? I broke it with my rifle.”
Speaking about his prison break, Zubeidi said it was “impossible for me to be imprisoned and not seek freedom. The prisoner who does not think about escaping prison does not deserve freedom.” He recalled being stuck in the tunnel for 10 minutes before another escapee pulled him free, and feeling “freedom flooding into my veins” when he emerged.
But he admitted the escape accomplished little and that he always knew it would “end in death or recapture.” Following the escape, he said, Israel imposed harsher conditions on Palestinian prisoners and he was placed in solitary confinement. For Zubeidi, the failed escape mirrors a larger reality: Palestinians, he said, face defeat whether they resist Israel through nonviolence or armed struggle.
“The intifada had failed, and the Palestinian Authority failed,” he argued, because Israel is “too strong to be defeated with violence, and too selfish to reward genuine Palestinian partnership with statehood. There is no peaceful solution and there is no military solution. Why? Because the Israelis don’t want to give us anything.”
“It’s impossible to uproot us from here,” he added. “And we don’t have any tools to uproot them.” Zubeidi said he is now pursuing a Ph.D. at Birzeit University in “Israel Studies,” hoping it will help him better understand the complexity of the conflict.