Azzam Al Shallalta dropped to his knees and wept at his mother’s feet as he arrived in the West Bank city of Ramallah with other Palestinian prisoners released under the Gaza ceasefire on Saturday.
A jubilant crowd carried Shallalta on their shoulders from the bus that brought him from jail, the freed prisoner still wearing his grey prison tracksuit.
“My situation was heartbreaking, truly heartbreaking. We pray to God to free all our brothers we’ve left behind,” he told the crowd, his head shaved and his face pale and thin under a long red beard.
“I can’t describe the feeling — just hearing the news that I would be released was overwhelming”, he said while shaking hands with well-wishers.
Around him Palestinians cheered and waved the national flag, as they welcomed dozens of prisoners who arrived in buses.
Hundreds waited in the local sports centre where the prisoners were dropped off for a short health checkup, while hundreds more watched on from the surrounding hills as fireworks went off.
Israel said it released 200 Palestinian prisoners on Saturday in exchange for four Israeli women soldiers held in Gaza since Hamas’s October 2023 attack which sparked the war.
Not all of the prisoners were bused to Ramallah. Sixteen were taken to Gaza, while 70 were sent via Egypt into exile in Algeria, Tunisia or Turkey. A total of 121 of the prisoners released had been serving life sentences.
So ‘much love’
Tareq Yahya, another freed prisoner, spoke with emotion as he stepped off the bus into the crowd. “It’s amazing how much love our people have shown us, how they’ve stood by us and expressed their solidarity,” the 31-year-old from the northern West Bank city of Jenin said.
Looking through the crowd, Yahya searched for relatives, finding none. “It seems, based on the situation in Jenin, they weren’t able to make it,” he said, referring to an ongoing Israeli military operation in the city. “I’ll try to find them, though.”
Thinking of the other prisoners who will be released in the coming weeks in exchange for Gaza hostages, Yahya said the ceasefire’s guarantors “need to set strong conditions to prevent the beatings, humiliation and mistreatment the jailers have inflicted on us in these last days before our release.”
Maisa Abu Bakr, 33, came early with her family to see her uncle Yasser Abu Bakr, whose name was on the list of those to be released this week.
She said they avidly followed the news “on Telegram and TV, and we were ready, wearing our (best) clothes, waiting for the time to get out and come here.”
Yasser Abu Bakr had been in jail since 2002 serving multiple life sentences.
“When the lists were published, we saw his name and we were surprised because we didn’t expect that he would be freed.”
‘Left hoping’
Others were not so lucky, like the family of Sadiqi Al Zaro, 65, who made the time-consuming journey from the southern West Bank city of Hebron through multiple Israeli checkpoints to Ramallah.
Zaro’s nephew Tareq told AFP the family had come after receiving a phone call from an Israeli intelligence officer who said he would be among those released on Saturday.
“We were shocked when the official lists were announced and his name wasn’t included,” he said.
The procedures for clearing prisoners for release are opaque and the final list was not released until a few hours before the buses arrived.
“There have been a lot of issues since the beginning of this prisoner release process. It’s been difficult for families to get clear confirmation,” Tareq Al Zaro said, his cousins nodding in agreement.
He said he was still hoping for his uncle’s release after 24 years in prison. “We’re leaving this in God’s hands. We came here based on a phone call, and God willing, he’ll be released based on an official announcement.”
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