Wearing black sweatpants, plastic sliders on bare feet, a zipped-up puffer jacket that revealed thin layers beneath, Mohamed Al-Tous had a quizzical look. At 69 years of age, Al-Tous’ thick mane of unkempt hair and his beard were completely white. After serving 39 years in Israeli prisons, he has earned the title of “dean” of the vast Palestinian prisoner population in Israeli captivity.
He was released on Saturday as part of the three-phase ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
But Al-Tous, who was sentenced to life at the age of 29, is one of 70 Palestinian prisoners whose liberation from Israeli incarceration is conditional upon their permanent deportation from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
On the seventh day of the three-phase ceasefire deal, Israel released 200 Palestinian prisoners on Saturday in exchange for four Israeli hostages who were held captive by the Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas.
This second batch of prisoner swaps brings the number of Palestinian prisoners released by Israel to 290 for seven Israeli hostages kidnapped during the 7 October 2023 cross-border operation by the Al-Qassam Brigades.
Back then, the Palestinian group abducted 251 Israelis, including soldiers and civilians, and demanded the release of all Palestinians held in Israeli prisons who then numbered over 3,307.
The first phase of the ceasefire agreement stipulates the release of 33 Israelis over six weeks in exchange for approximately 1,900 Palestinians. Of the 200 released this week, 121 were sentenced to life and 79 to maximum prison sentences.
The background of both the Palestinian prisoners and the Israeli hostages encapsulates the nature of the 76-year-old conflict. While the Israeli narrative limits the source of the conflict to the 7 October 2023 operation and Hamas, the stories of the Palestinian prisoners released since the start of the ceasefire refute this.
Al-Tous joined the resistance, in this case the Fatah Movement, in his teens and was arrested at the age of 14. He is among the generation of Palestinians from across the political spectrum still languishing in Israeli prisons from before the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. During his four-decade imprisonment, Al-Tous lost his wife, and his home was demolished three times by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).
He was able to hold and hug his son Shady for the first time in four decades earlier this week.
The exiled 70 Palestinian former prisoners will now be deported to other countries, and some will remain in Egypt, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Association.
Thabet Mardawi, 46, a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the West Bank, was arrested in 1994 and sentenced to 21 life sentences after he was convicted of masterminding military operations against the Israeli occupation.
Mardawi’s coming of age in the resistance began in 1987 during the first Palestinian Intifada when he was only 11 years old and before he joined Fatah. After he was arrested and held in prison for four years, in 1994 Mardawi joined PIJ, becoming active in the Jenin Refugee Camp in the West Bank.
With the advent of the second Intifada in 2000, he worked on expanding the military wing of the PIJ, the Al-Quds Brigades, becoming one of the group’s high-profile leaders.
Wael Al-Ghahoub, 49, from the left-wing Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was sentenced to life before he was released on Saturday, after spending 23 years in prison, including long periods in solitary confinement.
Al-Ghahoub, from Nablus in the West Bank, was arrested by the IOF in 1992 when he was 25 and sentenced to six years in prison for “resisting” the occupation. He was arrested again during the Second Intifada and convicted of armed resistance against IOF targets and Israeli settlers in Nablus.
The 200 Palestinians who were liberated this week include 137 from Hamas, 26 from Fatah, and 29 from the PIJ.
Three brothers, Nasr, 51, Sherif, 49, and Mohamed Abu Hemeid, 42, from Fatah’s military wing the Al-Aqsa Brigades, spent over three decades in prison serving life sentences. They were children when they began their activism during the Intifada before joining Fatah.
Their fourth brother, Nasser, who had also joined the resistance and been arrested, died in prison from cancer. Israel refused to return his body to his family, keeping it alongside dozens of other Palestinian corpses with the intention of using them in other prisoner-exchange deals.
The four Israeli hostages released earlier this week, aged between 18 and 20, were all kidnapped from the Nahal Oz Military Base.
Military service is compulsory in Israel, which was born out of war and founded on Palestinian territory in 1948 after the Nakba or Palestinian Catastrophe – the dispossession and expulsion of indigenous Palestinians from their homes and land by Zionist terrorist militias.
Because every Israeli Jew has to be drafted into the army, known as the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), this mass mandatory service turns civilians into soldiers, making Israeli society the most militarised in the world. After completing military service, many Israelis remain reservists for years or even decades.
Fewer than five km and a vast military fence separates the Gaza Strip from the Nahal Oz Military Base, which is home to a lush kibbutz.
On one side, 2.4 million Palestinians have been caged into 360 square km of the Gaza Strip under an Israeli air, land, and sea blockade since 2007. On the other side, a population of fewer than 500 Israelis enjoy a lush paradise of 600 square km founded as a military base in 1948 after the Nakba, before it transitioned into one of the many Israeli military-civilian communities that mark the border between Israel and Gaza.
It is part of the quintessential Zionist settler-colonialist project.
In 1967, the IOF occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai. Last year, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s principal judicial arm known as the world court, reiterated decades-old UN resolutions demanding Israel’s withdrawal from these Palestinian territories.
Israel denies it is an occupying entity or that it occupied Gaza prior to the 2023 October attack.
Two of the Israeli hostages released on the first day of the ceasefire hold dual British and Romanian nationality. Israel, an entity built on settler colonialism, has one of the highest percentage of dual nationals in the world, estimated to be around 10 per cent of the country’s population.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 30 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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