A collection of writings by the imprisoned Palestinian political leader Marwan Barghouti will be published in November, bringing together prison letters, interviews, personal material and documents from the last three decades of Barghouti’s political life and incarceration.

As deadly attacks on Gaza continue despite a nominal ceasefire, the 66-year-old is seen by many as the best hope for a leader of any future Palestinian state.

His book, Unbroken: In Pursuit of Freedom for Palestine, will be published by Penguin on 5 November this year, the publisher has told the Guardian.

Barghouti has been held in Israeli prisons since 2002, after being arrested in Ramallah, where he was serving as an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. He was captured and imprisoned after being accused of orchestrating attacks that resulted in the killing of five civilians, and convicted on terrorism charges by an Israeli court. The Inter-Parliamentary Union, an international organisation, criticised the trial at the time, arguing that it breached international law, including the Geneva conventions. Barghouti has consistently denied the charges against him.

Barghouti is a member of the Fatah party, a rival of Hamas, and has long advocated a two-state solution. Many argue that Israel’s refusal to release him is driven by concern that he could emerge as a powerful voice for the Palestinian cause.

Born in 1959 in the West Bank village of Kobar, Barghouti grew up under Israeli military occupation after the 1967 war and was arrested multiple times for political activism as a teenager. Over subsequent decades he emerged as a prominent figure within Palestinian politics, advocating Palestinian unity.

The forthcoming book will assemble private letters to Barghouti’s family written from prison, correspondence with public figures, press interviews, public statements, historical documents and photographs, alongside extracts from his book 1,000 Days in Solitary Confinement, which until now has been available only in Arabic.

Barghouti has spent extended periods in solitary confinement without access to his family and, according to former Palestinian detainees, has been subjected to multiple serious assaults in prison. In November 2025, the Guardian reported that he had not seen his family for three years, while his lawyers had been permitted to visit him only five times in the prior two years. The International Committee of the Red Cross has been barred from visiting him, a move that breaches international law.

In August last year, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, shared video footage in which he was seen taunting Barghouti and threatening him with execution.

Despite more than two decades in prison, successive opinion polls show Barghouti is the most popular Palestinian politician in Gaza and the West Bank. He is often cited by supporters as a potential unifying leader across factional divides, and has been described as “Palestine’s Mandela”. His continued prominence has fuelled international campaigns calling for his release.

The latest was launched in November 2025, with coordinated demonstrations and public art installations in Palestine and in cities including London, alongside protests across Europe, the US and South Africa. In December, more than 200 leading cultural figures – including Margaret Atwood, Annie Ernaux, Benedict Cumberbatch, Elif Shafak, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Tilda Swinton, Olga Tokarczuk, Colm Tóibín, Sir Ian McKellen and Gary Lineker – signed an open letter calling for his release.

An introduction to the book has been written by Barghouti’s wife, Fadwa Barghouti, a prominent advocate for his release. “For a long time, I have wished that the world could hear Marwan in his own voice, not through the noise surrounding him,” she said in a statement. “This book finally makes that possible – and I hope it helps people understand who Marwan Barghouti truly is, and how he embodies the Palestinian struggle for freedom and dignity.”

The Evin House of Detention, in Tehran, is among the world’s most infamous prisons. It was built by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, to hold around three hundred political prisoners, including some of the ayatollahs who campaigned against the monarchy. After the 1979 Revolution, Iran’s theocracy expanded the gruesome compound, which includes gallows and an execution yard. It now holds fifteen thousand people.

During reporting trips to Iran, I sometimes stayed nearby, at the former Hilton—renamed the Esteghlal, or the Independence Hotel—in what was an otherwise upscale and leafy neighborhood in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. I got nervous just driving by Evin. I had friends, including Americans, who were jailed there, usually in Ward 209. It housed political prisoners who were often detained on illusory charges, such as “spreading corruption on earth” and “enmity against God,” or ill-defined offenses like propaganda against the Islamic state. There are solitary-confinement cells without beds or toilets. Across the prison, wards are crammed with wall-to-wall double or triple-decker bunks. Even whispering can be punishable. Ward 209 has been a repository for detainees leveraged as pawns in Iran’s sadistic foreign policy. Journalists, diplomats, academics, businessmen, and environmentalists have been traded in lopsided deals for weaponry and money.

Sepideh Gholian, a thirty-year-old activist, details the desperation of prison life in Iran—and pays tribute to other female inmates—in an unusual, haunting new book called “The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes.” Gholian, once known for her blue hair, has been imprisoned three times since 2018. The first time, she was arrested for acting as an amateur publicist for laborers who were striking to protest unpaid wages at a sugarcane factory. She was forced to confess on national television to crimes against the state, which included having ties to an unlikely combination of the first Trump Administration and communist groups. After being released on bail, Gholian detailed the beatings, interrogations that lasted days and nights, sexual taunts, and death threats that she endured. She was arrested again; she spent more than four years in Evin.

In 2023, Gholian joyously walked out of Evin, removed her hijab, revealing wavy hair, and shouted condemnations of Iran’s Supreme Leader to bystanders. “Khamenei the tyrant, we’re going to put you in a grave!” she yelled. A video of the protest went viral. She was sent back to Evin within twenty-four hours. She’s now been there for more than six years in total, and has become one of the most famous activists and political prisoners in Iran, which is currently jailing more female writers than any other country, the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based group, reported last week. “Poets and writers are not criminals—they are the moral memory of a nation,” the report said. “When a government targets its writers and poets, it wages war on culture itself, and reveals the depth of its insecurity.”

“The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club” is part memoir, part exposé, and part cookbook. Chapters include heart-wrenching accounts of other women inmates’ past lives, and of their physical and psychological torture in prison, including coerced vaginal tests. The inmates brace themselves for these encounters based on the pace of the prison guards’ steps and smells. Their stories are mixed with brief respites: they bake pastries for one another. “You might well ask Isn’t prison . . . prison? How the hell could you be making confectionery there?” Gholian writes. “But if baking badly is an inalienable part of who you are, then you can do it anytime, anywhere, and—yes—in any kind of prison.”

In 2024, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an Iranian British woman who worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation and was jailed in Evin for six years, said that prisons were reluctant to give women basic rights, but “we were determined to fight for them.” She went on, “We fought for everything, from convincing them to give us a weekly mother-and-baby visit to raising money to buy an oven for the ward so we could bake our own bread which was not drugged with sedatives. Our power against them sometimes surprised ourselves as much as them.” (Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who had a toddler at the time of her arrest, had been in Iran to visit her parents during Nowruz, the Persian New Year.)

Gholian recounts her own campaign—alongside Niloufar Bayani, a wildlife biologist who was sentenced to ten years for espionage—to get cooking utensils. “They were plainly not going to release us so we were going to get a tart tin out of them, at least,” she writes.

Iran’s prison system, as in many other countries, is corrupt. Rich or famous prisoners have manipulated the system to bring in televisions, furniture, even what are locally known as “temporary” wives for sex. Prisoners often leave their goods behind upon release. Gholian managed to set up a piece-meal kitchen. Amid her tragic accounts, she provides recipes for sixteen delicacies, including tres leches cake, cream puffs, scones, and lemon-meringue pie. She often suggests whimsical ways—for those who are free—to eat them. Her recipe for apple pie is dedicated to Maryam Akbari Monfared, a mother of three whose three brothers and one sister were executed in a massacre of some five thousand political prisoners, in 1988. She was imprisoned on a charge of “enmity against God,” in 2009, for contacting an Iranian opposition group. Seven years later, while still in prison, she issued an open-letter demanding justice for her siblings. At the end of the recipe, Gholian recommends putting on a song. “Bob your head in time with the music” and lip-sync the words. When the pie is ready, “dance a while longer. If you have a companion, whirl around together and then tuck in with a cup of tea. If you don’t know any dances, watch a couple of videos online. There’s no need to be professional. Toss your head, rejoice.”

The text of the book was snuck out of Evin, in scraps, by unnamed allies. The pieces were passed to Maziar Bahari, an Iranian Canadian documentarian who was himself detained in Evin for a hundred and eighteen days during the Green Movement protests. (Jon Stewart made his directorial début filming Bahari’s harrowing prison account, titled “Rosewater,” for the scent of his prison guard.) Bahari now heads IranWire, a news website, in London. “For security reasons, I cannot tell you exactly how I received the different chapters of this book,” Bahari writes, in the introduction. “All you need to know is that it took several people and multiple phone calls with different individuals, including Sepideh, to receive separate chapters by text or photos showing scraps of paper.” Bahari’s team at IranWire typed up the passages and then had to figure out how to fit them together. The English-language edition, Bahari told me last month, made Gholian’s stories “much more bearable” than the original Farsi manuscript. For example, the word rosvaee, or رسوایی, translates in English as “disgrace” or “scandal.” But in Persian, notably in Khuzestan, Sepideh’s home province, it implies immoral conduct that can lead to so-called honor killings of females by their own families. “Thousands of women have been murdered by their fathers and brothers because of scandals,” Bahari said.

The man found guilty of attempted murder of Salman Rushdie has been sentenced to 25 years in prison.

On Friday, the Chautauqua county court issued the sentence to Hadi Matar, 27, of New Jersey, nearly three months after he was first convicted of attempted murder in the second degree.

Matar’s conviction followed an intense trial during which Rushdie, 77, detailed the moment when he felt certain that he was going to die from Matar’s attack during a literary gathering in western New York state in 2022. The author was severely wounded and lost the use of his right eye.

In a statement delivered to court before his sentencing, Matar said: “Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people … He wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.”

Matar was also sentenced to seven years for wounding Ralph Henry Reese, a moderator at Rushdie’s lecture who was on stage with him. According to the Chautauqua county district attorney, Jason Schmidt, Matar’s two sentences will run concurrently as both victims were injured at the same event.

“He designed this attack so that he could inflict the most amount of damage, not just upon Mr Rushdie, but upon this community, upon the 1,400 people who were there to watch it,” Schmidt said, adding that Matar in effect “chose this” maximum sentencing.

Meanwhile, the public defender Nathaniel Barone said Matar had an otherwise clean criminal record and disputed the prosecutors’ argument that the audience at the event should also be considered victims.

“Every day since then, for the last couple of years, this case has been an international publicity sponge,” Barone said, adding: “There was no presumption, ever, of innocence for Mr Matar from the very beginning.”

Matar’s sentencing on Friday follows an intense trial during which Rushdie was the key witness.

Speaking from the stand in February, Rushdie said: “I became aware of a great quantity of blood I was lying in. My sense of time was quite cloudy, I was in pain from my eye and hand, and it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying.” In total, Matar had stabbed Rushdie 15 times – in the head, neck, torso and left hand, resulting in severe injuries to his right eye, liver and intestines.

Following the attack, Rushdie was left permanently damaged in his right eye..

Matar’s motivation for trying to kill Rushdie stemmed from a 2006 speech delivered by Hezbollah’s chief at the time, Hassan Nasrallah, according to a federal indictment. In his speech, Nasrallah endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or death warrant, placed on Rushdie by Iranian religious leaders more than 35 years ago as a result of his novel, The Satanic Verses.

Following Rushdie’s stabbing, Matar admitted in 2022 to having read only “a couple pages” of the book which Iranian religious leaders denounced as blasphemous.

The Indian-born British-American novelist later detailed his experience and long road to recovery in a memoir called Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

The man who stabbed and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie in 2022 has been sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday for an attack that also wounded a second man, a district attorney has said. Hadi Matar was sentenced in a western New York courtroom, where a jury found him guilty earlier this year of attempted murder and assault. The 27-year-old stabbed Rushdie multiple times, blinding him in one eye, as the author was about to speak at the Chautauqua Institution

In a book due to be published a day before his release from prison this month, the former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro praises Donald Trump’s Maga movement – and claims to list errors and omissions that led to his four-month sentence for criminal contempt of Congress, for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6 committee.

But Navarro makes striking errors and omissions of his own, including jarringly misidentifying Ashli Babbitt – the Trump supporter shot dead at the US Capitol who became a martyr to many on the far right – as a US marine corps veteran.

Babbitt served in the US air force.

Navarro’s book, The New Maga Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to Donald Trump’s 2024 Policy Platform, will be published on 16 July – the day before Navarro’s release from prison. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Considering how he came to sit behind bars, Navarro says the US Department of Justice “played dirty pool”, neglecting its own policies on executive privilege.

He also claims a judge denied him a range of lawful defences; claims his jury was irredeemably biased; and claims jurors were ushered into the presence of anti-Trump protesters shortly before finding him guilty.

“How do you spell ‘mistrial’?” Navarro asks.

But in the same pages, in his account of the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, the culmination of the election subversion attempt in which he played a central role, Navarro makes errors and omissions of his own.

“Much of the ‘J6’ violence,” he writes, “ … was instigated not by Trump supporters, but rather by agent provocateurs – including FBI informants.”

As detailed by sources including Poynter, a nonpartisan, factchecking group, there is no evidence the FBI orchestrated January 6.

Navarro also claims “J6 violence was also apparently facilitated by Capitol Hill police officers, some of whom removed barriers and waved protesters” through.

CNN’s Daniel Dale, a leading factchecker, has written: “The claim the rioters were invited into the Capitol is false … about 140 police officers were assaulted while trying to stop the mob from breaching the Capitol. There were hours-long battles … dozens of officers engaged in hand-to-hand combat with rioters in a desperate effort to keep them out of the building.”

Navarro claims Nancy Pelosi, then House speaker, “rejected the 10,000 national guard troops requested by President Trump leading up to J6”.

As Politico wrote in response to Trump’s version of the claim in his debate against Joe Biden last week: “Trump never made such an offer, and Pelosi never rejected it, as Trump claimed. His military leadership has confirmed that there was no formal offer made, despite some private musings in the days before Jan 6.”

Navarro then makes two particularly jarring mistakes concerning Trump supporters killed at the Capitol.

After assigning Babbitt to the wrong military branch, Navarro says Rosanne Boyland was “beaten to death by Capitol police”.

Boyland died in a crush. Videos claiming to show police beating her have been debunked.

The New Maga Deal is not Navarro’s first book. His last, Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win It Back, was published in 2022.

It was a classic Trump White House tell-all, but Navarro was a controversial figure already. Before entering Trumpworld, he was a Harvard-PhD economist, China hawk, green activist and frustrated political candidate revealed to have published work quoting “Ron Vara”, a supposed expert whose name was an anagram of his own.

That didn’t stand in the way of an appointment to advise Trump. In 2016, Navarro became head of the White House National Trade Council and director of trade and industrial policy.

He achieved greater prominence in 2020, during the chaotic response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and as a key architect of Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat by Biden.

Navarro’s boasts about his efforts to change results in battleground states – notably via a plan he called the “Green Bay sweep” – placed him in the sights of the House January 6 committee.

Claiming his work for Trump was shielded by executive privilege, Navarro refused to comply. A Washington jury disagreed and Navarro was convicted last September. He was sentenced in January; an appeal to the US supreme court was denied in March, and Navarro reported to jail in Florida. As he did so, he touted his new book to reporters. He is due to be released on 17 July.

In The New Maga Deal – named for Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan – Navarro attempts to “clearly articulate what Maga represents”, in his words an “iron triangle of Populist Economic Nationalism” that seeks “only peace, prosperity and national security”.

Outlining what he says should be legislative priorities for Trump’s second term, Navarro includes contributions from Russ Vought, formerly Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, now involved in plans for far-reaching reforms; Mike Davis, widely tipped for US attorney general; and Frank Gaffney, a national security analyst accused of promoting Islamophobic views.

But the introduction may attract the most attention. It is written by Steve Bannon: like Navarro, a Trump White House aide convicted on criminal charges.

Also like Navarro, Bannon currently resides in a federal prison, having been convicted of criminal contempt of Congress for his own refusal to cooperate with the January 6 committee. Also sentenced to four months, the former chief White House strategist began his sentence in Connecticut this week.

On the page, Bannon says Navarro’s book offers readers “lessons learned from the rock star of Trump’s first term … exhilarating to read, energising to think about.

… Bravo, brother Navarro.”