“While this book is fundamentally based on facts, the events recounted are not solely my story nor that of any specific individual. Every Palestinian has a connection, in one way or another, to the events mentioned in the text. The imagination in this work is shaped around certain key figures only to fulfill the requirements of a novel. Everything else bears the traces of real incidents. I have either personally experienced everything I have recounted or heard it directly from those who have lived through these events in our beloved Palestinian lands for decades.”
                                                                                  
Yahya Ibrahim Sinwar / Beersheba Prison, 2004
 
Yahya Sinwar, one of the most prominent figures of the Palestinian resistance, intertwines his personal memories, sorrows, and hopes with the unique and enduring story of the Palestinian people in this work titled “The Thorn and the Carnation”, which he penned during his quarter-century of imprisonment.
Beyond its qualities as a novel, the work—which can also be read as an autobiography or memoir—covers the fundamental and critical stages of the Palestinian people’s continuous and multifaceted struggle, spanning from the heavy defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War to the 2000s, when the Al-Aqsa Intifada shook the region. In this book, which emerged from the dungeons of the occupation and the darkness of captivity by managing to hide from the eyes of guards and the filthy hands of executioners, the relentless attacks, exoduses, pains, deprivations, yearnings, massacres, and occasional joys are presented with an insider's perspective and a poignant narrative.