9 June 2026: Layan Nasir, a young Palestinian woman from Bir Zeit in the Ramallah area of the Israel-occupied West Bank, and a student at Bir Zeit university, was arrested in July 2021 in a dawn raid at her home, on charges of unlawful association. She was later remanded on bail, but arrested again in April 2024. Layan has only recently been released.
Roger Spooner, co-founder of the BPP, with his wife Monica, just received this email from his friend Samia Khoury, in Ramallah (Samia is the author of Reflections from Palestine: a journey of hope, published by Rimal Books in 2014), where she went to celebrate the release of her cousin.
‘On Sunday I was determined to make that trip to Bir Zeit to attend the Thanksgiving service that the Anglican Church was holding on the occasion of the release of our cousin Layan Nasir from the Israeli “ Damoun” prison.
Due to my aging days and the checkpoints all over the occupied territories I have been avoiding any trips beyond Jerusalem. Occasionally, and with a lot of planning so that I could meet with my siblings, I manage to make it to Ramallah where my sister Rima lives, and midway between where I live and Birzeit where my brother and his wife live. Gone are the days when I used to hop in my car and be in Ramallah in 15 minutes and it took another 15minutes to get to Bir Zeit. This has become “Mission Impossible” nowadays.
However, “thinking positively” at the advice of my daughter I was determined to join her and her husband to go to Bir Zeit. Being in that church brought back so many memories of the services during our school days, and during my working years at Bir Zeit College. I saw a number of people whom I hadn’t seen for years. It was nice that there were still some Birzeitis who remembered me. The church entrance has become elderly friendly and a new hall was built where a reception was held after the service.
I could not but recall the memory of the last service I had attended in that church before leaving Bir Zeit after I got married 66 years ago. I cried so much because I was leaving my home, my town and my church to join Yousef in the Catholic Church.
Surprisingly, however. I felt so much at home with the liturgy, which with the ecumenical movement has become practically the same including the communion. I remembered how my aunt Aniseh, who regularly sat at the last seat in church, would sit in the front on the day she planned to take communion because she wanted to be the first one to drink wine from the chalice.
Besides the parish pastor Rev. Fadi Diab, we were pleasantly surprised with the presence of Rev. Munther Issac, who is presently the parish priest of the Lutheran church of Ramallah, and who continues to advocate for the release of the prisoners.
We are grateful that Layan is with her family now. But Please continue to pray for the release of all prisoners
With warm greetings, Samia Nasir Khoury’
The BPP herewith links to an explanation at our annual conference in 2022, by Michael Lynk, a former UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, of how Britain set up these oppressive laws and how Israel chose to keep them on the books after the British left in 1948.