The Israeli-occupied West Bank has erupted in celebrations after 90 Palestinian prisoners, most of them women, were released from Israeli jails as part of an Israel-Hamas ceasefire.
Families in the West Bank waited until early on Monday to receive their loved ones, most of whom had been detained without charge.
The ceasefire, which ended Israel’s more than 15-month war on Gaza, also saw the release of three Israeli captives. More captives and prisoners are expected to be released in the coming weeks.
Here is what we know about the Palestinian prisoners who were freed:
Who are some of the prominent Palestinians released?
The prisoners – 69 women and 21 children – were released about 1am on Monday (23:00 GMT on Sunday). They were taken to the West Bank city of Ramallah in Red Cross buses.
Only eight of the 90 prisoners were arrested before October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led Palestinian groups carried out attacks in southern Israel. The attacks killed more than 1,100 people, saw about 250 taken captive and triggered Israel’s war on Gaza.
Israel killed more than 47,000 Palestinians during its offensive on Gaza, drawing criticism for using disproportionate force against civilians and targeting hospitals and schools. It also killed more than 850 Palestinians and detained more than 7,000 in often violent raids across the West Bank.
Khalida Jarrar, leader of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and a feminist activist, was one of the most prominent prisoners released.
Jarrar has served prison terms in Israel since 2015 for being vocal about Palestinian prisoner rights and being affiliated with an “outlawed” party. The PFLP is considered a “terrorist” group by Israel.
In a statement in 2016, New York-based Human Rights Watch said Jarrar’s repeated arrests were part of Israel’s wider crackdown on nonviolent political opposition to its half-century of military occupation of Palestinian lands.
Her most recent arrest was on December 26, 2023.
The Palestinian’s first arrest came in March 1989 during an International Women’s Day protest at Birzeit University in the West Bank. She was a master’s student at the time.
Jarrar emerged as a feminist leader as she fought against gender stereotypes and worked for the empowerment of female entrepreneurs in the West Bank. She carried out community work in Nablus, helping clean public spaces and improve public schools. She was later elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council.
She served as the director of the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association from 1994 to 2006.
“There’s this double feeling we’re living in: on the one hand, this feeling of freedom that we thank everyone for and, on the other hand, this pain of losing so many Palestinian martyrs,” Jarrar told The Associated Press news agency after she was released.
Another prominent released prisoner is journalist Rula Hassanein, an editor for the Ramallah-based Wattan Media Network. She was arrested by Israeli forces on March 19 as part of mass arrests of Palestinians.
Hassanein, 30, was tried before an Israeli military court at Israel’s Ofer Prison. She was charged with incitement on social media over posts that reportedly included retweets on X and her expression of frustration over the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.
How many more prisoners will be released?
The first phase of the three-phase ceasefire is to last 42 days. During this time, 33 Israeli captives are to be released, including female civilians and soldiers as well as children and elderly civilians.
In exchange, up to 1,900 Palestinian prisoners are to be freed.
On day one of the exchange, three Israeli captives were released from Gaza: 24-year-old Romi Gonen, 28-year-old Emily Damari and 31-year-old Doron Steinbrecher.
Before their release, about 100 captives were believed to be left in Gaza. It remains unclear how many are still alive.
The remaining captives, besides the 33 slated for release in the first phase, are reportedly male soldiers who are to be released in exchange for an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners.
How many Palestinians are in Israeli prisons?
Before the release of the 90 prisoners on Monday, there were 10,400 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, not including those detained in Gaza during the past 15 months of war, according to the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.
“If they do something very little to challenge the status quo, they are faced with jail time,” according to Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim. Ibrahim said many children have been imprisoned by Israel for charges related to throwing rocks at Israeli forces.
“The list of prisoners, the hundreds of names that have been released, are mostly serving administrative detention, which is a tactic used by Israel to keep people in prison indefinitely without charges,” Ibrahim said.
Prison conditions
“I left hell and now I’m in heaven. We’re all out of hell. They used to violate us, beat us, fire tear gas towards us,” Abdelaziz Atawneh, a boy freed from an Israeli prison on Monday, told the media.
“There’s no food, no sweets, no salt,” he said.
Israeli prisons are notorious for mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners and observers commented on how Jarrar appeared to be frail in appearance compared with how she looked at the time of her latest arrest.
United Nations agencies, investigators and human rights organisations have documented arbitrary arrests, inhumane and degrading treatment, torture and deaths of Palestinians in Israeli custody.
On the other hand, the captives freed and sent to Israel seemed to be in good health, Israeli media reported.
The three captives, “together with their mothers, just landed at a hospital, where they will be reunited with the rest of their families and receive medical treatment”, the Israeli military said in a statement. The three released captives are at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv.
In April, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, head of orthopaedics at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, died in Israel’s Ofer Prison. His family said al-Bursh was tortured to death.
“The release of Palestinian prisoners, including women and children, does not mean that the conditions of captivity have changed. Israeli negotiators insisted that nothing will change inside Israeli prisons,” Basil Farraj, an assistant professor at Birzeit University, told Al Jazeera.
“This is actually very worrisome, and it explains why families were gathered to receive the loved ones because they know the hell that [the prisoners] have been undergoing is brutal.”
Farraj added: “This shows that this carceral regime is intended to break Palestinian prisoners. It intentionally tries to break their spirit and soul.”
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