Israel to release longest-serving Palestinian inmate Nael al-Barghouti
Nael al-Barghouti, the longest-serving Palestinian inmate, is to be released on Saturday after over four decades in Israeli prisons, under the ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement.
Barghouti, who was arrested by Israeli police in 1978 at the age of 19, called his family on Tuesday that he would be released on Saturday under the seventh round of captive-prisoner exchange as part of the ceasefire deal, the Palestinian Media Center reported.
Barghouti, now 67, has been subjected to the worst forms of torture behind bars and suffers from several ailments. He was even denied the right to attend his father’s funeral in 2004 by the Israeli authorities.
He also told his family that his release would be conditional on his forced exile to an undisclosed country, the report added.
Barghouti, now a symbol of Palestinian resilience, was sentenced to 112 years in prison for allegedly killing an Israeli occupation officer north of occupied Ramallah. In 2009, he broke the Guinness World Record for the world’s longest-serving political prisoner.
He was released in a prisoner exchange deal between Hamas and the Israeli regime in 2011. However, the freedom did not last long. In June 2014, Israeli authorities reneged on the terms of the exchange deal and re-arrested Barghouti, sentencing him to 30 months in prison but after completing his term, they reinstated his original life sentence plus 18 years.
There were about 5,200 Palestinians in Israeli prisons before Al-Aqsa Flood operation in October 2023. The number has now risen to more than 10,000 people as per the statistics given by Palestinian officials.
The occupying entity failed to achieve its declared objectives of freeing captives and eliminating Hamas despite killing at least 48,284 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in Gaza.
After 15 months of genocide, Israel accepted Hamas’ longstanding negotiation terms under the Gaza ceasefire, which began on January 19.
The ceasefire consists of three phases, each lasting 42 days. In phase one - the current phase - a total of 33 Israeli captives will be released in exchange for around 2,000 Palestinian abductees held in the regime’s jails.
So far, Hamas has released 19 Israeli captives and five Thai nationals in return for 985 Palestinian abductees.
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