'Locked up for 24 years': joy and sorrow as Palestinian prisoners and detainees return home

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/13/palestinian-prisoners-return-home

‘Locked up for 24 years’: joy and sorrow as Palestinian prisoners and detainees return home

Nearly 2,000 prisoners and detainees – including around 1,700 people seized from Gaza and held without charge – set free from Israeli jails

William Christou and Sufian Taha in Ramallah
Mon 13 Oct 2025 11.18 EDT

The police could not hold the crowds back. As soon as they saw the Palestinian prisoners through the windows of the bus, hundreds of people gathering in front of a theatre in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank rushed forward, chanting the names of loved ones they had not seen for years and in some cases, decades.

The prisoners were gaunt, the sharp angles of their faces decorated by freshly scabbed-over wounds. Loved ones hoisted them up on their shoulders with ease. One prisoner, swaddled in a Palestinian keffiyeh and splaying his fingers into a V for victory, was dropped before his mother, whose feet he began to kiss.

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Israel also forbade people from celebrating the prisoners’ release on Monday, firing teargas at family members and journalists waiting near Ofer prison, in the occupied West Bank, where detainees were kept. A flyer distributed by the Israeli military warned people that “we are surveilling you everywhere” and threatening that if they supported “terrorist organisations” they could be arrested.

The Guardian spoke with six different relatives of prisoners who said they were visited by Israeli security services in recent days.

“They came to warn us not to hold celebrations, not to raise flags or banners, not to gather in the diwan [hall]. These days, the hardest thing is to speak the truth,” said a relative of the prisoner Hani al-Zeer, who asked not to be identified by name out of fear of security repercussions. Al-Zeer had been imprisoned for 23 years, and the relative, as well as al-Zeer’s son, had also been imprisoned several times.

… more … some released prisoners deported no one knows where …