With Milad Daqqa, Sanaa Salameh, Ahlam Bsharat, and Qasam al-Haj

Saturday 18 July 2026, 18:00–20:00
Location: the Palestinian Museum
Language: Arabic

Marking what would have been Walid Daqqa’s 65th birthday, the Palestinian Museum launches his autobiography, The Ticket Seller. The book traces the arc of a life at once intimate and political: from childhood in Baqa al-Gharbiyye, through the awakening of political consciousness, to nearly four decades of captivity in Israeli occupation prisons.

In The Ticket Seller, narrative becomes a form of resistance, and language a space where survival and memory are held. It is a book about steadfastness, dignity, and humanity, and about the capacity to make hope possible and keep life going, even under the harshest conditions.

Daqqa writes his life with exceptional candour, bringing personal reflection into dialogue with national narrative. What emerges is a living testimony to Palestinian identity, to the meaning of freedom, and to the time prisoners make for themselves inside Israeli occupation prisons. Through the book, we come to know Walid as a man and freedom fighter, as son, husband, and father, bound to land, family, love, and hope in the face of a system that sought to turn prison into a final fate.

The autobiography began on the inside in 1999. It reached his wife, Sanaa Salameh, in audio messages and scattered papers smuggled out of Israeli occupation prisons before it was completed towards the end of his life, as he struggled with illness and medical neglect in those same prisons. Published by Dar al-Adab in Beirut in 2026, the autobiography appears while the Israeli occupation continues to withhold Daqqa’s body.

Join Ahlam Bsharat, Qasam al-Haj, and Sanaa Salameh for readings and a conversation on Daqqa’s life, writing, and testimony.