Israel’s Justice Ministry said 737 prisoners and detainees will be released under the first phase of a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release agreement approved on Saturday. It said in a statement on its website that “the government has approved the release of 737 prisoners and detainees currently in the custody of the prison service”.
Israel’s Cabinet voted to approve the ceasefire agreement early Saturday, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, ending days of uncertainty over whether the cease-fire would go into effect this weekend.
Those named by the ministry include men, women and children, who it said will not be released before 4:00 pm local time (1400 GMT) on Sunday.
It had previously published a list of 95 Palestinian prisoners, the majority of whom were women, to be freed in exchange for Israeli detainees in Gaza.
Zakaria Zubaidi, head of the armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, was among those included in the expanded list. Zubaidi escaped from Israel’s Gilboa prison in 2021 with five other Palestinians, prompting a day-long manhunt, and was hailed as a hero by Palestinians. Apart from this, leftist Palestinian MP Khaleda Jarrar, who was arrested and imprisoned by Israel on several occasions, is also to be released.
Jarrar is a prominent member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group designated a “terrorist organization” by Israel, the United States, and the European Union.
Detained in late December in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967, the 60-year-old has been held without charge since then.
Two sources close to Hamas told AFP that the first group of hostages to be released included three Israeli female soldiers.
However, since the Palestinian Islamist movement considers any Israeli of military age who has completed mandatory service to be a soldier, the reference may also apply to civilians abducted during the attack that started the war.
The first three names on a list obtained by AFP of 33 hostages to be released in the first phase are women under the age of 30 who were not in military service on the day of the Hamas attack. Justice Ministry spokeswoman Noga Katz said the final number of prisoners to be released in the first exchange would depend on the number of surviving hostages released by Hamas.
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