Amid Palestinian joy for freed prisoners lies concern it will be short-lived

Nihaya Abu Al-Humus hugged and kissed her 17-year-old son, Muhammed, over and over again in the family room of their east Jerusalem home as if she hadn’t seen him in a lifetime.

“This is the dream I prayed for,” said Ms. Abu Al-Humus, cradling her son Tuesday, six months after he had been arrested by Israeli police in a roundup of local youth in his neighborhood in August.

Reunions like this have been playing out across east Jerusalem and the West Bank this week as Israel released women and children prisoners in return for Israeli hostages freed by Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza.

The releases have reunited Palestinian families, returned mothers to their children, and sent home boys and girls, mostly teenagers between the ages of 15 and 17. And they have spurred celebrations resembling rallies in front of prisons in Israel and at Israeli checkpoints in the occupied West Bank.

With each nightly Israeli release of Palestinian prisoners, Palestinians in the heart of the West Bank have raised the green flag of the Islamist Hamas, overtaking the traditional yellow flag of Fatah, the Palestinian faction that dominates the West Bank and the governing Palestinian Authority.

It is the largest and most visible expression of pro-Hamas sentiment in the West Bank since the 2007 schism in which Hamas evicted Fatah from Gaza.

The spike in shows of appreciation for Hamas coincides with frustration with Fatah and the ineffective and increasingly autocratic Palestinian Authority. Yet there is an underlying wariness among Palestinians that the detainee releases offer only a temporary relief for a few families and are no solace for the suffering and deaths of friends and relatives in Gaza.

Moreover, with arrests and violence still spiraling across the West Bank, and concerns that war is set to begin anew in Gaza, Palestinians say the fleeting joy is no substitute for a resolution to the overall conflict. The release of detainees, they say, does nothing to ease the uncertainty and violence they face on a daily basis.

Ammar Awad/Reuters

People wave flags in celebration as Palestinians are released from an Israeli military prison amid a hostages-for-prisoners swap between Hamas and Israel, in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, Nov. 26, 2023.

“Our happiness feels incomplete with ongoing war and the losses we are seeing in Gaza,” Buthaina Matar said Friday night as she waited for hours at a prison checkpoint in Beitunia for her sister Rawan to be released.

Rawan, who was charged with causing bodily harm to an Israeli soldier and was among the first batch of Palestinian prisoners to be released, stepped off the International Committee of the Red Cross bus and hugged her family. With a wary face, she said her freedom was bittersweet.

“Our happiness will only be complete when the Israeli jails are truly all empty,” Rawan said.

In the five rounds of hostage-prisoner exchanges since Nov. 24, Hamas has released 60 Israeli hostages it abducted Oct. 7 and Israel has released 180 Palestinian women and children held in its jails. A sixth exchange was in the works Wednesday.

As of late Wednesday, the United States, Egypt, and Qatar continued urgent talks to broker an agreement between Israel and Hamas to extend the pause in fighting past its Thursday morning deadline to facilitate further releases.

The detainee releases have so far excluded Palestinians who Israel says have carried out lethal attacks and Hamas militants whom Hamas wants released – and Israeli soldiers held by Hamas.

The released Palestinian women and minors were being held on charges that, according to the Israeli government, ranged from “association” with an illegal group and “throwing stones” to “damage to security area” and “attempted murder.”

The Hamas flags in the West Bank have been a protest statement.

For released Palestinians and their families, it has been both a relief and a burden knowing that the reason for their release is a war that as of Wednesday has killed more than 13,000 Palestinians in Gaza and also claimed the lives of 1,200 Israelis Oct. 7.

“The sentiments we saw on the ground in Beitunia, in Al-Bireh, and in Ramallah mirror the will of the people, which is a public dismay over Fatah’s strategy of endless years of negotiations, yielding nothing,” says researcher and former detainee Esmat Mansour.

Less than a demonstration of an ideological affinity for Hamas, analysts say the surge in pro-Hamas expressions is born of frustration over passive Palestinian leadership amid Israeli military raids, settler attacks, and an unprecedented wave of arrests. According to the United Nations, the raids have killed 232 Palestinians, including 61 children, in the West Bank since Oct. 7.

“The people simply do not see any action from the PLO or the Palestinian Authority leadership,” says Mr. Mansour, who was released in 2011 with hundreds of others in return for captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

With 3,260 Palestinians arrested in the West Bank and east Jerusalem since Oct. 7, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, there is also a fear among families that their loved ones’ releases offer only a temporary reprieve.

“As long as there is an occupation, the arrests will not stop,” says Palestinian Prisoners’ Society spokesperson Amany Sarahnah. “People must understand this is a central policy of occupation against the Palestinians to restrict any kind of resistance.”

Ammar Awad/Reuters

A released Palestinian prisoner reacts after leaving an Israeli military prison, in Ramallah, West Bank, Nov. 26, 2023.

Underscoring those concerns: In the first four days of the Israel-Hamas truce, Israel arrested 133 Palestinians, compared with 150 who were released. Israel says the recently arrested Palestinians were militants planning attacks or had expressed support for terrorism; Palestinians say many of those arrested were detained for online posts denouncing the war in Gaza or supporting Hamas.  

Some 6,704 Palestinians are held in Israeli jails, according to the Israeli nongovernmental organization HaMoked. Of those, at least 2,070 are held in administrative detention without charge – a form of detention that Palestinian and Israel human rights groups say has been on the rise since Oct. 7.

Nariman Tamimi’s husband, veteran Fatah activist Bassem Tamimi, and her daughter activist Ahed Tamimi were both arrested and placed in administrative detention in the weeks after the Oct. 7 attack.

The younger Ms. Tamimi, who was set to be released late Wednesday, was arrested at the family home in Nabi Saleh outside Ramallah for a post calling for violence against Israelis on what the family says was a fake social media account bearing her name.

“Far-right Israeli activists are putting photos of me online and calling for my arrest as well. We live every moment knowing any of us can be arrested at any moment,” Ms. Tamimi says. “I am not going to cry for my husband and daughter, because all my tears have been used up for Gaza.”

“Most of us Palestinian men go in and out of prison from when we are little. It is not a question of if, but when,” says Abu Laith in Ramallah, a delivery driver who spent two stints in Israeli prisons in the early 2000s. His son, he says, was arrested two years ago for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers and was released earlier this year.

“This war may have brought temporary relief to a few families, but it is all temporary,” he says. “We are still living in an open-air Israel prison, and at any moment any of us will be taken to a concrete prison.”