N

Leila Hatoum

X: @Leila1h

At just 19, Ali Hassan Tarhini is the youngest of the 20 Lebanese hostages kidnapped by the terrorist zionist israeli occupation forces.
Born on 28 June 2006, Ali’s life had been abruptly torn away from everything familiar, for no reason. Ali turned nineteen in a concentration camp, surrounded by the cold walls of a moldy cell, where he lay wounded, and in pain, away from the loving faces and smiles of his mother, father and siblings. 
 

Ali is a BT3 vocational civil-education student. This year, 2025, was supposed to be a milestone for him; he had studied hard, preparing to sit for his official national exams. But all of that ended on 28 January 2025.

On that day, after a ceasefire agreement between the Lebanese government and the israeli occupation came to full effect, Ali tried to participate in the peaceful march of unarmed Lebanese civilians towards entering the southern Lebanese villages that the israeli occupation was supposed to withdraw from. At the entrance of the town of Adaysseh, the peaceful march was met with life fire from the israeli occupation.

That’s when Ali’s life changed forever. He was struck with an exploding bullet in the back and tore through his abdomen, leaving him gravely wounded, as the israeli occupation sniper cheered on from a distance. Paramedics tried to reach Ali, but the israei occupation forces blocked them. Bleeding and in desperate need of care, he was snatched by the zionist soldiers to Ramleh prison, in occupied Palestine.

Months later, in March, instead of receiving a mother’s day gift from her son, Ali’s mother received devastating news. Five Lebanese hostages who were released at the time spoke of him. They described how Ali struggled even to walk or stand, the untreated wound from that day having left lasting damage. They said he was suffering—his injury never properly addressed, his pain never eased.

His family waits for him still. His parents, his grandparents—people whose lives once revolved around his laughter—now wake each morning hopeful but hollowed by fear. Their grief is made heavier by the inaction of the Lebanese government, and by the occupation’s ban on the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been prevented from reaching Ali or even checking on his condition.

And so Ali, once just a student with dreams and exam dates marked on a calendar, now spends his nineteenth year in a place where time feels frozen. A year that should have been full of beginnings has become instead a story of absence—of a boy taken, wounded, and kept far from every hand that ever cared for