Jerusalem:
The longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails, Nael Barghouti who spent more than four decades behind bars, walked free on Thursday under the latest hostage-prisoner swap of a fragile Gaza truce.
Barghouti spent 45 years behind bars, including 34 of them consecutively, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Club advocacy group.
He arrived in Egypt on Thursday, after being expelled from the Palestinian territories upon his release.
Barghouti was first arrested in 1978 and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of an Israeli officer and attacks on Israeli sites.
At the time, he was a member of Fatah, the movement of current Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, a rival to the Islamist group Hamas.
The hostage-prisoner swap which took place in the early hours of Thursday was the seventh and last in the first phase of the fragile truce between Israel and Hamas. The deal took effect on January 19 and its first phase expires on Saturday.
Israel’s Prison Service on Thursday confirmed that “643 terrorists were transferred from several prisons across the country” and released under the terms of the truce deal, after Hamas handed over the bodies of four hostages.
The ceasefire has largely halted more than 15 months of fighting that destroyed or damaged more than 69 percent of Gaza’s buildings, displaced almost the entire population, and triggered widespread hunger, according to the United Nations.
Under the first phase, Hamas freed 25 living Israeli and dual-national hostages seized in its October 7, 2023 attack and returned the bodies of eight others. It also released five Thai prisoners outside the deal’s terms.
Israel, in return, was expected to free around 1,900 Palestinian prisoners.
Barghouti was freed once before, in 2011, as part of an exchange of Palestinian prisoners in return for an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas. He was then placed under house arrest in Kubar, in the occupied West Bank.
He was arrested again in 2014, and defected from Fatah to join Hamas in prison.
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