2017 witnessed one of the longest Palestinian prisoners' hunger strikes since the inception of the prisoners' movement in the early days of the Israeli occupation. The forty day long "freedom and dignity strike" and the significant manifestations of support and solidarity that accompanied it brought the prisoners' issue back to the forefront of the public agenda in the OPT and re-opened the discussion over the prospects of a mass-based popular resistance against the Israeli occupation. Indeed, in view of the steady decline of the prisoners' movement, the predicament of the "Intifada of individuals", and the countless failed reconciliation attempts between Fatah and Hamas, the persistence of a collective, jointly orchestrated prisoners' strike instilled high hopes. These found ample expression in addresses and commentaries by Palestinian public figures, officials and community leaders alike, which highlighted the image of the prisoners' movement as a vanguard of the national movement. Accordingly, as the strike unfolded, it was frequently portrayed as an opportunity for the return of the prisoners' movement to a pivotal standing, and thereby for the revival and reorientation of the Palestinian resistance as a whole. Yet, once the strike ended, the popular upheaval it aroused was quick to dissolve. Based on findings from a socio-historical research on the Palestinian prisoners' movement and its impact on the public agenda in the OPT, my paper examines the role of the prisoners' movement as vanguard. Testimonies of former prisoners' leaders reveal that during the 1980s, the political factions in prison accorded crucial importance to the political and ideological instruction of prospective cadres, so that upon their release they would assume central organizational positions on the level of the community, the union, the district, and the region. These efforts proved especially fruitful in the wake of the prisoners' exchange of May 1985, when hundreds of well-trained, newly released prisoners engaged in the creation and expansion of a network of popular committees and organizations throughout the OPT; these would subsequently become the backbone of the first Intifada. In light of this record, I maintain that the role of vanguard was predicated upon the capacity to utilize organizational skills and political education that were developed by the movement inside prison for the expansion of the resistance to the occupation outside it. I then turn to analyze the present fragmentation of the prisoners' movement, explaining why it cannot resume the role of vanguard today.