CAIRO (AP) — as discuss ceasefire in Gaza As the pace of hostage releases accelerates, Hamas is expected to seek the release of the most high-profile prisoners held by Israel, including the most popular and potentially unifying Palestinian politicians. Marwan Barghouti.
Israel considers Barghouti and others to be the masterminds of terrorist attacks that killed Israeli civilians, and has refused to release them in past negotiations. But pressure to end the war and bring back the remaining 48 captured hostages continues to grow. Hamas attack on October 7, 2023about 20 of whom are thought to be alive.
Many Palestinians see it this way. thousands of prisoners Detained by Israel as a political prisoner or resistance freedom fighter decades of military occupation.
Israel fears history will repeat itself after liberation Hamas official Yahya Sinwar In the 2011 exchange. The longtime prisoner was one of the main architects of the October 7 attack and led a militant group until he was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza last year.
Here are some of the prisoners believed to be at the top of the list that Hamas said it presented to a mediator this week.
Marwan Barghouti
Opinion polls have shown in recent years that Barghouti, 66, is the most popular Palestinian politician, suggesting he will easily win the presidential election, which has not been held since 2005.
He is far more popular than Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and is seen as a possible successor to him and a man who could mend long-standing rifts between Abbas’ Fatah movement and Hamas. Some have compared him to Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned for 27 years before becoming South Africa’s first black president.
Barghouti was a senior Fatah leader in the Israeli-occupied West Bank during the 2000 intifada, and Israel claims he orchestrated attacks that killed several people. He was arrested in 2002 and subsequently sentenced to five life sentences. He offered no defense and refused to recognize the legitimacy of Israeli courts.
He supports the establishment of a Palestinian state in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, but is opposed by Israel’s current government and much of its political class.
Abdullah Barghouti
Kuwaiti-born Barghouti, who has no direct connection to Marwan, is a senior bomb maker for Hamas and a commander during the 2000 intifada, and was involved in several notorious attacks on Israeli civilians, primarily in Jerusalem.
An Israeli court sentenced him to 67 life sentences in 2004, the longest life sentence in the country’s history, after he was convicted of attacks that killed 66 people, including five Americans, and injured more than 500 others.
Now in his early 50s, he was convicted of making the bombs used in the Hebrew University attack that killed five Americans and four Israelis, the suicide bombing at a branch of Pizzeria Sbarro that killed 15 people, the cafe suicide bombing that killed 11 people, and the triple bombing at Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall that killed 10 people.
In their verdict, the judges expressed their regret that the death penalty was not an option. The only death penalty carried out by Israel was that of Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann in 1962.
Ahmed Saadat
The leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a small, armed leftist faction, was accused of orchestrating the 2001 assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, an ultranationalist who called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians.
Saadat and four PFLP activists directly involved in the killing were eventually arrested by Palestinian police. In April 2002, a hastily convened interim tribunal at then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s West Bank compound sentenced the four men to prison terms ranging from one to 18 years. Saadat was not charged, and Palestinian authorities said at the time that they did not believe he was involved in the killing.
In an internationally brokered agreement that year, he was transferred to a Palestinian prison in the West Bank city of Jericho. In 2006, fearing he would be released, Israel stormed the prison and detained him and other Palestinians. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2008 and is now in his early 70s.
Hassan Salama
Hassan Salama, a senior Hamas militant, was sentenced to 46 life sentences in 1997 for bombing two commuter buses in Jerusalem and other attacks that killed and injured dozens of people.
After the assassination of Hamas’s chief bomb maker Yahya Ayyash in 1996, he led a series of retaliatory attacks. Salama, now in his early 50s, was arrested later that year.
Hamas carried out several large-scale attacks against Israeli civilians in the 1990s, when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Arafat, were negotiating peace negotiations mediated by the United States.
These negotiations have repeatedly broken down over the aftermath of attacks and Israeli settlement expansion. There have been no substantive negotiations since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office in 2009.
Abbas Al Said
Al-Sayed, now in his late 50s, served as a senior Hamas commander in the West Bank during the 2000 intifada and is believed to have been involved in the insurgency’s deadliest attack.
He was sentenced to 35 life sentences and an additional 100 years in prison for his role in multiple attacks, including a suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in the coastal city of Netanya that killed 30 people and injured 140 during Jewish Passover celebrations in March 2002.
The attack marked the peak of the uprising, and Israel launched a major military operation across the occupied West Bank.
___
Follow AP’s war coverage. https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war
