The police could not hold the crowds back. As soon as they saw the Palestinian prisoners and detainees through the windows of the bus, hundreds of people gathering in front of a theatre in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank rushed forward, chanting the names of loved ones they had not seen for years or, in some cases, decades.
Their faces were gaunt, the sharp angles decorated by freshly scabbed-over wounds. Loved ones hoisted them up on their shoulders with ease. One, swaddled in a Palestinian keffiyeh and splaying his fingers into a V for victory, was dropped before his mother, whose feet he began to kiss.
