Ramallah, January 20 (RHC)-- Ninety Palestinian prisoners have been released on the first day of the ceasefire agreement. They are all women or children.
The freed prisoners include Khalida Jarrar, a politician and leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in the occupied West Bank. Jarrar has previously been imprisoned by Israeli authorities on multiple occasions for charges including “incitement” related to her public statements about the Israeli occupation.
According to Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim, the Palestinians being released also include children, some of whom were imprisoned indefinitely for throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers.
“The list of prisoners, the hundreds of names that have been released, are mostly serving administrative detention, which is a tactic used by Israeli policy to keep people in prison indefinitely without charges,” said Ibrahim. “These administrative detentions keep getting renewed over and over again.”
There are currently more than 10,000 Palestinians from the occupied West Bank in Israeli prisons, according to the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.
The number of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip who were imprisoned by Israel during its war on the besieged enclave is unknown.
Palestinian lawmaker Khalida Jarrar is welcomed by Palestinian activists after her release from an Israeli jail at the Israeli Jbara checkpoint, near the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem, on June 3, 2016 [File: Abed Omar Qusini/Reuters]
