RAMALLAH: Israel freed 90 Palestinian prisoners and detainees early on Monday, hours after three Israeli hostages released from Hamas captivity in Gaza returned to Israel.
Large white buses carrying the detainees exited the gates of Israel’s Ofer prison, just outside the West Bank city of Ramallah, as celebratory fireworks erupted overhead.
Crowds of Palestinians thronged the buses, chanting and cheering.
According to a list provided by the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Prisoners’ Affairs, all of those released were women or minors.
Israel detained all of the people on the list for what it said were offences related to the country’s security, from throwing stones to more serious accusations such as attempt to murder.
The Israeli military, which occupies the West Bank, repeatedly warned Palestinians against any form of public celebration.
The release took place in the middle of the night, in what Palestinians criticised as an attempt to dampen the mood and deter crowds from welcoming the prisoners home.
The most prominent of the detainees being freed is Khalida Jarrar, 62, a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP, a secular Leftist faction that was involved in hijackings and other attacks against Israel in the 1970s but has scaled back its militant activities in recent years.
Since her arrest in December 2023, Jarrar was held under indefinitely renewable six-month administrative detention orders, a practice denounced by human rights groups as a violation of international law.
Dalal Khaseeb, 53, sister of late senior Hamas official Saleh Arouri who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in southern Beirut in January 2024 is also being released, along with Abla Abdelrasoul, wife of jailed PFLP leader Ahmad Saadat.
The agreement for the swap, laid out as part of the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, involves Hamas gradually releasing 33 Israeli hostages held in the Palestinian enclave over the next six weeks in exchange for Israel releasing nearly 2,000 prisoners and detainees from the West Bank and Gaza.