BEITUNIA, West Bank: Over three dozen Palestinian prisoners returned home to a hero’s welcome in the occupied West Bank on Friday following their release from Israeli prisons as part of a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas.
The procession of freed prisoners, some accused of minor offenses and others convicted in attacks, at a checkpoint outside of Jerusalem stoked massive crowds of Palestinians into a chanting, clapping, hand-waving, screaming frenzy.
Fifteen dazed young men, all in stained grey prison sweatsuits and looking gaunt with exhaustion, glided through the streets on the shoulders of their teary-eyed fathers as fireworks turned the night sky to blazing color and patriotic Palestinian pop music blared.
Some of those released were draped in Palestinian flags, others in the green flags of Hamas. They flashed victory signs as they crowd-surfed.
“I have no words, I have no words,” said newly released 17-year-old Jamal Brahma, searching for something to say to the hordes of jostling journalists and thousands of chanting Palestinians, many in national dress. “Thank God.”
Tears fell down his father Khalil Brahma’s cheeks as he brought his son down from his shoulders and looked him in the eye for the first time in seven months. Israeli forces had arrested Jamal at his home in the Palestinian city of Jericho last spring and detained him without charge or trial.
“I just want to be his father again,” he said.
The release of the Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails came just hours after two dozen hostages, including 13 Israelis, were released from captivity in Gaza in the initial exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners during the four-day cease-fire that started Friday.
Under the deal, Hamas is to release at least 50 hostages, and Israel 150 Palestinian prisoners, over the four days. Israel said the truce can be extended an extra day for every additional 10 hostages freed.
Although the atmosphere was festive in the town of Beitunia near Israel’s hulking Ofer Prison in the West Bank, people were on edge.
The Israeli government has ordered police to shut down celebrations over the release. Israeli security forces at one point unleashed tear gas canisters on the crowds, sending young men, old women and small children sprinting away as they wept and screamed in pain.
“The army is trying to take this moment away from us but they can’t,” Mays Foqaha said as she tumbled into the arms of her newly released 18-year-old friend, Nour Al-Taher from Nablus, who was arrested during a protest in September at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. ”This is our day of victory.”
The Palestinian detainees freed Friday included 24 women, some of whom had been sentenced to years-long prison terms over attempted stabbings and other attacks on Israeli security forces. Others had been accused of incitement on social media.
There were also the 15 male teenagers, most of them charged with stone-throwing and “supporting terrorism,” a broadly defined accusation that underscores Israel’s long-running crackdown on young Palestinian men as violence surges in the occupied territory.
For families on both sides of the conflict, news of the exchange — perhaps the first hopeful moment in 49 days of war — stirred a bittersweet jumble of joy and anguish.
“As a Palestinian, my heart is broken for my brothers in Gaza, so I can’t really celebrate,” said Abdulqader Khatib, a UN worker whose 17-year-old son, Iyas, was placed last year in “administrative detention,” without charges or trial and based on secret evidence. “But I am a father. And deep inside, I am very happy.”
Israel is now holding an all-time high of 2,200 Palestinians in administrative detention, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, an advocacy group, in a controversial policy that Israel defends as a counter-terrorism measure.
Since Oct. 7, when Hamas took roughly 240 Israeli and foreign citizens hostage and killed 1,200 Israelis in its unprecedented rampage through southern Israel, Palestinians have wondered about the fate of their own prisoners.
Israel has a history of agreeing to lopsided exchanges. In 2011, Hamas got Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a single captive Israeli soldier, Gilad Schalit.
A prisoner release touches Palestinian society to its core. Almost every Palestinian has a relative in jail – or has been there himself. Human rights groups estimate that over 750,000 Palestinians have passed through Israeli prisons since Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem in 1967.
Whereas Israel views them as terrorists, Palestinians refer to them by the Arabic word for prisoners of war, and devote a good chunk of public funds to supporting them and their families. Israel and the US have condemned the grants to prisoner families as an incentive for violence.
“These kinds of prisoner exchanges are often the only hope families have to see their sons or fathers released before many years go by,” said Amira Khader, international advocacy officer at Addameer, a group supporting Palestinian prisoners. “It’s what they live for, it’s like a miracle from God.”
Since the Hamas attack, Israel has escalated a months-long West Bank crackdown on Palestinians suspected of ties to Hamas and other militant groups. Many prisoners are convicted by military courts, which prosecute Palestinians with a conviction rate of more than 99 percent. Rights groups say Palestinians are often denied due process and forced into confessions.
There are now 7,200 Palestinians in Israeli prison, said Qadura Fares, the director of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, with over 2,000 arrested since Oct. 7 alone.
On Friday in Beitunia, a lanky and pimpled 16-year-old, Aban Hammad, stood unmoving, looking shaken by the tumult of tears, hugs and pro-Hamas chants around him. It was his first glimpse of the world after a year in prison for throwing stones in the northern town of Qalqilya. He was freed even though he had eight months of his sentence left to serve.
He turned toward his father, wrapping him into a hug. “Look, I’m almost bigger than you now,” he said.
Palestinian families rejoice over release of minors and women in wartime prisoner swap
https://arab.news/9bkbb
Palestinian families rejoice over release of minors and women in wartime prisoner swap
- The procession of freed prisoners, some accused of minor offenses, stoked massive crowds of Palestinians into a chanting, screaming frenzy
- Fifteen dazed young men, all in stained grey prison sweatsuits, glided through the streets on shoulders of their teary-eyed fathers amid fireworks
Turkiye to reopen its embassy in Syria for the first time since 2012 in wake of Assad’s fall
- “It will be operational as of tomorrow,” said Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan
ANKARA: Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan says that Türkiye’s Embassy in Syria’s capital of Damascus will reopen on Saturday, for the first time since 2012.
In an interview with Türkiye’s NTV television Fidan said a newly appointed interim charge d’affaires had left for Damascus on Friday together with his delegation.
“It will be operational as of tomorrow,” he said.
The Embassy in Damascus had suspended operations in 2012 due to the escalating security conditions during the Syrian civil war. All embassy staff and their families were recalled to Türkiye.
The horror of Saydnaya jail, symbol of Assad excesses
- The prison complex was the site of extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances
- When Syrian militants entered Damascus on Sunday after their lightning advance that toppled the Assad government, they announced they had seized Saydnaya and freed its inmates
BEIRUT: Saydnaya prison north of the Syrian capital Damascus has become a notorious symbol of the inhumane abuses of the Assad clan, especially since the country’s civil war erupted in 2011.
The prison complex was the site of extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances, epitomising the atrocities committed against his opponents by ousted president Bashar Assad.
When Syrian militants entered Damascus on Sunday after their lightning advance that toppled the Assad government, they announced they had seized Saydnaya and freed its inmates.
Some had been incarcerated there since the 19080s.
According to the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Saydnaya Prison (ADMSP), the militants liberated more than 4,000 people.
Photographs of haggard and emaciated inmates, some helped by colleagues because they were too weak to leave their cells, were circulated worldwide.
Suddenly the workings of this infamous jail that rights group Amnesty International had dubbed a “human abattoir” were revealed for all to see.
The prison was built in the 1980s during the rule of Hafez Assad, father of the deposed president, and was initially meant for political prisoners including members of Islamist groups and Kurdish militants.
But down the years, Saydnaya became a symbol of pitiless state control over the Syrian people.
In 2016, a United Nations commission found that “the Syrian Government has also committed the crimes against humanity of murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, torture, imprisonment, enforced disappearance and other inhuman acts,” notably at Saydnaya.
The following year, Amnesty International in a report entitled “Human Slaughterhouse” documented thousands of executions there, calling it a policy of extermination.
Shortly afterwards, the United States revealed the existence inside Saydnaya of a crematorium in which the remains of thousands of murdered prisoners were burnt.
War monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in 2022 reported that around 30,000 people had been imprisoned in Saydnaya where many were tortured, and that just 6,000 were released.
The ADMSP believes that more than 30,000 prisoners were executed or died under torture, or from the lack of medical care or food between 2011 and 2018.
The group says the former authorities in Syria had set up salt chambers — rooms lined with salt for use as makeshift morgues to make up for the lack of cold storage.
In 2022, the ADMSP published a report describing for the first time these makeshift morgues of salt.
It said the first such chamber dated back to 2013, one of the bloodiest years in the Syrian civil conflict.
Many inmates are officially considered to be missing, with their families never receiving death certificates unless they handed over exorbitant bribes.
After the fall of Damascus last week, thousands of relatives of the missing rushed to Saydnaya hoping they might find loved ones hidden away in underground cells.
Saydnaya is now empty, and Syria’s White Helmets emergency workers group announced the end of search operations there on Tuesday, with no more prisoners found.
Several foreigners also ended up in Syrian jails, including Jordanian Osama Bashir Hassan Al-Bataynah, who spent 38 years behind bars and was found “unconscious and suffering from memory loss,” the foreign ministry in Amman said on Tuesday.
According to the Arab Organization for Human Rights in Jordan, 236 Jordanian citizens were held in Syrian prisons, most of them in Saydnaya.
Other freed foreigners included Suheil Hamawi from Lebanon who returned home on Monday after being locked up in Syria for 33 years, and also spent time inside Saydnaya.
American released from Syrian prison is flown out of the country, a US official says
- Travis Timmerman, 29, was flown out of Syria on a US military helicopter
- Timmerman was detained after he crossed into Syria while on a Christian pilgrimage
WASHINGTON: The US military has transported out of Syria an American who had disappeared seven months ago into former President Bashar Assad’s notorious prison system and was among the thousands released this week by rebels, a US official said Friday.
Travis Timmerman, 29, was flown out of Syria on a US military helicopter, according to a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing operation.
It’s unclear where Timmerman may go next. After being rescued, he thanked his rescuers for freeing him but has told American officials that he would like to stay in the region, according to another person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly.
Timmerman was detained after he crossed into Syria while on a Christian pilgrimage from a mountain along the eastern Lebanese town of Zahle in June.
He told The Associated Press that he was not ill-treated while in Palestine Branch, a notorious detention facility operated by Syrian intelligence.
In his prison cell, Timmerman said, he had a mattress, a plastic drinking container and two others for waste.
He said the Friday calls to prayers helped keep track of days.
Timmerman said he was released Monday morning alongside a young Syrian man and 70 female prisoners, some of whom had their children with them, after rebels seized control of Damascus and forced Assad from power in a dramatic upheaval.
He said he was freed by “the liberators who came into the prison and knocked the door down (of his cell) with a hammer.” He had been held separately from Syrian and other Arab prisoners and said he didn’t know of any other Americans held in the facility.
Timmerman is from Urbana, Missouri, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Springfield in the southwestern part of the state. He earned a finance degree from Missouri State University in 2017.
RSF attacks main hospital in North Darfur’s Al-Fasher, says health official
CAIRO: The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces attacked the main still-functioning hospital in Al-Fasher, in Sudan’s North Darfur state, on Friday, killing nine people and injuring 20, according to a local health official and activists.
A drone fired four missiles at the hospital, destroying wards, waiting areas, and other facilities, said state health minister Ibrahim Khatir and the Al-Fasher resistance committee, a pro-democracy group that monitors violence in the area.
Images they shared showed debris scattered over hospital beds and damaged ceilings and walls.
The RSF says it does not target civilians and could not immediately be reached for comment.
Sudan’s army and the RSF have been locked in conflict for more than 18 months, triggering a profound humanitarian crisis in which more than 12 million people have been driven from their homes, and UN agencies have struggled to deliver relief.
Al-Fasher is one of the most active frontlines between the RSF, the Sudanese army, and its allies, fighting to maintain a last foothold in the Darfur region.
Observers fear that an RSF victory there could bring ethnic retribution, as happened in West Darfur last year.
Lebanon has ‘reached the brink of collapse’ despite ceasefire, UN report warns
- Lebanese army continues deployment in Khiam, opens road to Marjayoun
- Israeli army claims to have found Kornet missiles, anti-tank launch platform in southern Lebanon
BEIRUT: The Lebanese army command said its units were being deployed in the border village of Khiam on Friday after entering it on Thursday as a new UN report warned that Lebanon had “reached the brink of collapse” despite the signing of a ceasefire agreement last month to end hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.
The UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia also urged a reassessment of priorities, emphasizing that care is a fundamental element in achieving social stability and economic recovery.
In a study titled “Restoring Care, Rebuilding Communities: Path to Recovery for Lebanon,” ESCWA highlighted that the effects of the conflict extended beyond immediate humanitarian needs, affecting health, education, and social infrastructure.
On Friday, Lebanese army units began clearing the main road from the north of the town to the south, connecting Khiam to Marjayoun, by removing rubble and potential explosives left by the Israelis.
The army command said the deployment of its military units was taking place in coordination with the five-member committee tasked with monitoring the ceasefire agreement.
Israel completed the withdrawal of its forces from Khiam on Thursday morning.
The Lebanese army command warned “citizens not to approach the area and abide by the instructions of the military units until the completion of the deployment.”
A Lebanese resident who was killed on Thursday when Israeli forces raided Khiam Square a few hours following the Lebanese army’s entry to the area has been identified as Mustafa Awada. Several people were injured in the Israeli assault.
Awada had just broadcast a live video from his phone when an Israeli attack drone killed him and injured many others who were with him in Khiam Square.
The Lebanese army retrieved Awada’s body and transported it to the Marjayoun Governmental Hospital on Friday.
The Israeli army continued its hostilities in the invaded southern area, raiding the coastal town of Naqoura on Friday morning.
An Israeli drone also raided the Tebna area near Baisariyeh.
The Israeli army renewed its warnings to residents of southern Lebanon, instructing them not to move south of an area that includes 50 villages, the houses and infrastructure of which have been almost destroyed.
Lebanon’s southern border with Israel extends 120 km from the west of Naqoura to the east of Shebaa, constituting an area of 30,575 hectares.
There are 30 towns and villages on the borderline, comprising an estimated 32,000 homes.
Some 170,000 people reside in these towns, including around 90,000 permanent residents, who are still displaced.
Official statistics indicate that 70 percent of people in the area Israeli forces invaded are Shiites, while the remaining residents include Sunni Muslims, Druze, and Christians.
Israeli troops are set to withdraw from the area within 60 days since the ceasefire agreement came into force.
Under the ceasefire agreement, the Lebanese army is supposed to deploy 6,000 soldiers south of the Litani River to work in coordination with UN peacekeeping force UNIFIL to extend state authority and withdraw unauthorized weapons from the area.
Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee claimed on Friday in a social media post that Brigade 769 forces discovered and destroyed “Kornet missiles and an anti-tank missile launcher” in southern Lebanon.
Adraee claimed that the forces discovered numerous combat tools, including rocket launchers and Kornet missiles camouflaged in rugged and mountainous areas, in addition to Kalashnikov rifles, ammunition magazines, and other military equipment.
They also found an anti-tank rocket launcher that Hezbollah operatives had used to fire at towns in the Galilee panhandle area over the past year, which was subsequently confiscated.
Adraee said Israeli forces also “discovered a weapons depot containing RPG shells and mortar rounds, all of which were confiscated.”
The troops were conducting field operations to “neutralize threats,” he added.
Also on Friday, explosions were heard in the mountain range and villages of Baalbek-Hermel, in eastern Lebanon.
It was confirmed that these explosions originated from firing ranges located east of Baalbek, where the Lebanese army was detonating missiles left over from the recent Israeli aggression.
The Masnaa border crossing between Lebanon and Syria continued to witness heavy traffic for the sixth consecutive day, with families fleeing Syrian territory following the fall of the Assad regime.
The Lebanese General Security prevents the entry of those who do not meet specific conditions while facilitating the passage of Syrian refugees in Lebanon returning to their homeland.
Several Lebanese truck owners, stranded in Daraa, Syria, appealed to Lebanese authorities to urgently intervene to facilitate the passage of their vehicles to Lebanon through the Masnaa border crossing.
The truck owners said in their plea that their number is estimated at 70 trucks loaded with cheese and food products destined for Lebanese markets.
They said that delays in procedures and increasing restrictions at the border left the trucks stranded on Syrian land for several days.
The Lebanese army on Friday launched an investigation into a road accident involving 30 Syrian nationals who sustained injuries when the passenger bus they were traveling in overturned and collided with a curb in Akkar, in the far north of Lebanon.
It was revealed that those travelers had entered Lebanon clandestinely through an illegal border crossing along the Nahr Al-Kabir river between Syria and Lebanon.
The bus driver, a Lebanese national, was among 11 injured people who needed to be hospitalized. Some passengers were in critical condition.
In other developments, Wafiq Safa, Hezbollah’s head of liaison and coordination unit, has assured that the movement would support the Lebanese army’s mission as outlined in the ceasefire agreement to the greatest extent possible.
The assurance came at a recent meeting between Army Commander Gen. Joseph Aoun and Safa, the Central News Agency, known as Al-Markazia, reported on Friday.
The parliament speaker’s adviser, Ahmed Baalbaki, was also present.
Safa previously survived airstrikes targeting him in Beirut in October.
