As thousands of Palestinian students complete their final high school exams this summer and look ahead to university, 17-year-old Nada Bani Odeh and 16-year-old Ola Qutaishat are spending these same weeks behind bars in Israel’s Damon Prison, far from classrooms, textbooks and the futures they had been preparing for.
Nada was due to sit the Palestinian secondary school examinations, known as "tawjihi", this year, while Ola had just finished the 11th grade and was preparing for her final year of school.
Instead, the two girls - among the youngest Palestinian female prisoners - now face repeated court hearings after being arrested in separate cases over social media posts. Their families say the arrests have interrupted their education and put their academic ambitions on hold.
From prison, however, the questions they continue to send home are not about court proceedings but about school: their grades, their classmates, and whether they will still have a chance to return to the education they were forced to leave behind.
When Israeli forces raided the family’s home in the occupied West Bank before dawn on 12 February, Nada’s mother, Gharam Abu Aisha, said she initially assumed the soldiers had come for her husband.
