The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society says that 110 Palestinians will be released from Israeli prisons today in the third phase of a ceasefire and captive exchange deal between Israel and Hamas.
Eight captives will also be released by Hamas and other Palestinian groups, including five Thai nationals and three Israelis.
Most of the freed Palestinians are expected to arrive in the Radana area of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank at approximately 12pm local time (10:00 GMT), the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said.
This will not include 20 prisoners who will be sent into exile outside Palestine. The prison advocacy group also published a list of the names and ages of the prisoners to be released, which included at least 30 children.
Among the names included on the list is Zakaria Zubeidi, 49, a prominent former Palestinian resistance fighter and theatre director whose dramatic jailbreak from an Israeli prison in 2021 thrilled Palestinians and stunned security officials in Israel.
Zubeidi once led the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which is affiliated with the Fatah party that controls the Palestinian Authority (PA), and was active during uprisings against Israeli occupation between 2000 and 2005, The Associated Press reports.
In 2019, after Zubeidi had already served years in Israeli prisons, he was arrested again.
But in 2021, he and five other prisoners tunnelled out of a maximum-security prison in northern Israel, an escape that helped solidify Zubeidi’s image among Palestinians as a folk hero.
He and the five other escapees were recaptured later.
In 2006, Zubeidi established The Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp – his home in the north of the occupied West Bank – to promote cultural resistance to Israel.
The theatre, which has brought its original theatre productions on tour internationally, provides a creative outlet for local men, women and children to process their experiences living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank.
Violent Israeli raids are common in the Jenin refugee camp, which is seen as a centre of Palestinian resistance within the occupied West Bank.
Israeli forces are currently carrying out an intensive military operation in the camp, which has entered its second week and has killed at least 16 Palestinians and wounded dozens.
Israel’s military said on Wednesday that it had killed 18 Palestinians and arrested 60 in Jenin and Tulkarem as part of its ongoing operation in the occupied territory.
Thousands still imprisoned
The 110 Palestinians due to be released will bring to a total of 400 Palestinians released from Israeli prisons as the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas continues to hold.
In that time, Israeli forces have arrested dozens more Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including 12 Palestinians arrested in occupied East Jerusalem for allegedly violating a ban on “expressions of joy” and “identification with Hamas” during the second release of prisoners last week.
Prior to the current round of prisoner releases, 10,400 Palestinians were being held in Israeli custody, including more than 3,300 held in administrative detention without charge or trial.
The records of Palestinian prisoners do not include Palestinians detained by Israeli forces during their war on the Gaza Strip, of which many are health workers, including Dr Hussam Abu Safia, the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital.
Israeli soldiers detained Abu Safia on December 29 after violently attacking his hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip.
Last week, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights said Israeli authorities had extended a ban preventing Abu Safia from meeting with his lawyers until February 6 after Israel’s Ashkelon Magistrates Court extended his detention without charge until February 13.
According to a joint statement from Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups, Palestinian residents of Gaza taken prisoner by Israeli forces have been held separately from other Palestinian prisoners, including in “ad hoc, army-administered detention camps, primarily situated in the Naqab desert in southern Israel”.
“Testimonies from released prisoners indicate that the torture inflicted on Gaza detainees has reached unprecedented levels,” the rights groups Addameer, Al Mezan, Al-Haq, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) said last year, following the news that Palestinian orthopaedic surgeon, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, had been killed in Israeli custody.
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