TEMPO.CO, Ramallah - They were greeted with fireworks, flags, cheers, tears and victory signs. Thousands of Palestinians turned out in the West Bank and Gaza in the early hours of Wednesday morning, August 14, to welcome the 26 long-term prisoners released from Israeli jails.
They are the first group of a total of 104 long-term prisoners to be released over the next nine months; part of the deal to begin the first substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The dialogue is scheduled to take place next week.
President Mahmoud Abbas met 11 men who returned to the West Bank with a handshake and a kiss on each cheek outside the presidential compound in Ramallah.
"We congratulate ourselves and our families for our brothers who left the darkness of the prisons for the light of the sun of freedom. We say to them and to you that the remainder are on their way, these are just the first," Abbas told the crowd.
All the freed men were convicted of murder or accessory to murder. Many of their victims' relatives opposed their release through anguished protests in Israel, saying the price the peace negotiations was too high.
A last-minute petition by family members to halt the release was rejected by Israel's high court on Tuesday. "Our hearts are with the bereaved families, whose pain is immense," chief justice Asher Grunis wrote in the court's decision. "But we are certain that the authorized officials made their decision with a heavy heart, taking the families' position into account."
For Abbas, the release was a tangible success after years of pressing for freedom for prisoners jailed before the Oslo accords were signed in 1993.
In Gaza, thousands of Palestinians went to the Erez crossing to welcome 15 freed prisoners with dancing and chanting. Hours after the men's return to the tiny coastal territory the Israeli air force struck targets in Gaza in response to a rocket fired earlier.
Hamas welcomed the release of prisoners but insisted Palestinian liberation would come through resistance rather than negotiations. "The path to freedom is the path of victories and sacrifices, not concessions of the Palestinian people's principles, rights and honour," Mahmoud Zahar told a press conference in Gaza on Sunday.
Meanwhile a senior Palestinian official warned that peace talks could collapse because Israel announced on Tuesday that more than 900 new homes would be built in Gilo, a settlement across the pre-1967 Green Line in Jerusalem. "Settlement expansion goes against the US administration's pledges and threatens to cause the negotiations' collapse," said Yasser Abed Rabbo. "It threatens to make talks fail even before they've started."
US secretary of state, John Kerry, said the settlement plans were "to some degree expected", amid suggestions that the construction was a quid pro quo for the prisoners' release. "We have known that there was going to be a continuation of some building in certain places and I think the Palestinians understand that," he said on a trip to Bogota.
GUARDIAN | BBC | ABDUL MANAN