Israel began releasing more than 300 Palestinian security prisoners, including three dozen serving life sentences for terror killings, after Hamas released Israeli hostages Sagui Dekel-Chan, Iair Horn and Sasha Troufanov on Saturday as part of the Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal.
According to the Hamas-linked Prisoners’ Information Office, 369 Palestinians were set to be released, including 333 Palestinians who had been detained in Gaza during the war and 36 who had been serving life sentences.
The prisoner release was the largest so far in the ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas.
In an apparent reaction to Hamas dressing released hostages in prison garb and handing them “gifts” of Palestinian paraphernalia, the Israel Prison Service dressed the Palestinian detainees in shirts bearing a blue Star of David, the Shin Bet logo and, in Arabic, the phrase: “We will not forgive or forget.”
The prisoners were also said to have been given a Shin Bet-themed wristband and shown a film about the destruction in Gaza.
About an hour after the hostages were returned to Israel, live footage showed the first bus of Palestinian prisoners leaving the Ofer Prison for Ramallah in the West Bank, where a crowd of enthusiastic supporters received them.
Alighting the bus, most Palestinian prisoners appeared to wear keffiyehs or overcoats, which hid any Israeli insignia from view.
More buses full of prisoners pulled out of an Israeli prison in the Negev desert heading toward Gaza.
The 333 Gazans were being returned to Gaza. Of those serving life sentences, 10 were sent to the West Bank and one to East Jerusalem. Another 25 were being deported to Gaza, or abroad, via Egypt.
In the current first phase of the deal, Israel has agreed to release some 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, including over 270 serving life sentences, in return for 33 Israeli women, children, civilian men over 50 and those deemed “humanitarian cases.”
With the release of Saturday’s hostage release — the sixth of the current deal — Hamas has freed 20 Israeli captives, and another five Thai captives, in the deal so far.
Dekel-Chen, Horn and Troufanov were abducted from their homes in Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.
Among the life-term Palestinian prisoners released Saturday are Ahmed Barghouti, Ahmed Abu Hader, Bacher Najjar and Shadi Abu Shakhdam, all of whom carried out prominent terror attacks during the 2000-2005 Second Intifada.
Barghouti, a senior official in Fatah — Hamas’s secularist rival — is serving 13 life sentences for several terror attacks, including dispatching suicide bombers, in Jerusalem, which killed 12 Israelis and wounded dozens. He will be deported abroad via Egypt.
He was arrested alongside Fatah terror chief Marwan Barghouti in 2002. Marwan Barghouti is not slated for release in the deal’s first phase.
Abu Hader was serving 11 life sentences for a shooting attack that killed six Israelis at an event hall in Hadera. He was also convicted of planning a terror attack at the Sheba Medical Center.
Najjar was serving six life sentences for a shooting attack that killed four Israelis, including a 9-year-old child, at an interchange in the southern West Bank.
Abu Shakhdam, of the Marxist faction Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was serving six life sentences for involvement in a 2002 suicide bombing at Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market. The attack killed six people and wounded more than 80.
The Gazans slated for release Saturday include Hussam Abu Safiya, director of north Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital.
The IDF detained Abu Safiya after raiding his hospital in December, during a siege of north Gaza. Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of operating out of hospitals. Saffiya’s detention, which Israel initially denied, provoked criticism from medical groups worldwide, including the Israeli-Palestinian group Doctors for Human Rights. The legal group representing Abu Safiya has accused Israel of torturing him.
Seventy-three of the hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7, 2023, remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 35 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Hamas has so far released 21 hostages — civilians, soldiers, and Thai nationals — during a ceasefire that began in January. The terror group freed 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that.
Eight hostages have been rescued alive by troops, and the bodies of 40 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the body of an IDF soldier who was killed in 2014. The body of another IDF soldier, also killed in 2014, was recovered from Gaza in January.