RAMALLAH/GAZA (Dispatches) – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says that the issue of Palestinian prisoners in the Zionist regime’s jails will remain a Palestinian priority until all of them are released.
Abbas made the remarks during a meeting with the family of Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah movement’s central committee member who has been in an Israeli prison for 21 years, Palestinian official news agency WAFA reported.
According to a statement published by WAFA, Abbas told the family members of Barghouti that their efforts continue to free the Fatah leader and all other prisoners and detainees from the occupying regime’s jails and prisons.
Barghouti, a prominent Fatah leader who enjoys wide popularity, was imprisoned in 2002 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The occupying regime detains over 7500 Palestinians in more than 20 prisons, including 31 female prisoners and 160 children. Over 400 Palestinian prisoners have remained in prisons for more than 20 years, and more than 1,000 are so-called administrative detainees, according to official Palestinian statistics.
Meanwhile, an official with the Islamic resistance movement Hamas denied Zionist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement that a prisoner exchange deal between the two sides would soon be completed.
Israeli media have reported that Netanyahu had informed his cabinet ministers that there were indirect talks with Hamas about a possible prisoner exchange deal without revealing any details.
In 2016, Hamas announced for the first time that it was keeping four Zionists without specifying their fate, while the occupying regime said that two of the four were soldiers who were actually killed, and the two others were kept by Hamas.
In 2011, Egypt brokered a prisoners’ exchange deal between the occupying regime and Hamas, which included the release of the Zionist soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured in 2006 for releasing 1,028 Palestinian prisoners from the regime’s prisons.