RAMALLAH, West Bank, 18 April 2004 — Palestinians held rallies yesterday across the West Bank and Gaza Strip to raise pressure on Israel to free thousands of Palestinian prisoners. Sheikh Abdullah Shami, a speaker for the Islamic Jihad, warned during a rally in Gaza that his group might resort to abducting Israeli soldiers as a bargaining chip if the Jewish state fails to take action soon.

Some 10,000 Palestinians took to the streets in Gaza City to mark the annual day of solidarity with Palestinian prisoners. They marched with banners behind a mock jail surrounded by barbed wire mounted on a truck, while thousands attended protests staged throughout the West Bank.

Rallies for the annual commemoration of “Prisoner Day” were also staged in the West Bank towns of Ramallah, Tulkarm, Nablus and Hebron. Thousands of people held aloft photographs of the prisoners and banners praising them as they marched through Ramallah, the town which Israel has barred Palestinian President Yasser Arafat from leaving.

“Freedom for all the knights of liberty,” one banner read among the crowd, which included relatives of the prisoners and members of Palestinian political groups.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath urged Israel to agree to a “total” release of prisoners. Such a step would be essential to renewing peace efforts, he told reporters in Ramallah.

Photographs included those of Marwan Barghouti and Sheikh Hassan Yussef, respectively, the West Bank leaders of Arafat’s Fatah movement and the resistance movement Hamas who are in prison.

A group of scouts led the march playing martial music while giant loudspeakers set up on the main square here broadcast patriotic songs. A Fatah statement distributed paid tribute to the prisoners as “pillars of the resistance.”

In Hebron, a town where thousands of Jewish settlers live, Israeli and American flags were burned at a protest involving some 1,500 people, Palestinian sources said.

In Gaza City, some 3,000 people marched through the center, as Hisham Abdelrazzek, the Palestinian minister in charge of the prisoner issue, warned “that security and stability will not reign in the region without our prisoners freed.”

A Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, said freeing the prisoners was a top priority for his group. “We will pursue the resistance until our people achieve their aspirations, with the release of our prisoners from occupation jails topping the list,” he said.

“The region will neither enjoy stability nor calm as long as there are people held in occupation prisons,” he added.

Islamic Jihad leader Sheikh Shami warned Israeli soldiers could be abducted in order to exchange them for Palestinians held in Israeli jails. “We will work for the release of prisoners. If that does not happen through peaceful means, we will resort to other methods which have been effective, such as exchanges,” he said.

“The policy of kidnapping Zionist soldiers should be adopted,” said Shami, whose group had carried out numerous suicide bombings against Israelis. He said militants “are working on this.”

Some 7,500 Palestinians are in Israeli jails, including 378 people aged between 12 and 18 years old as well as 86 women, according to official Palestinian statistics. Israel in January freed hundreds of Palestinians among some 400 prisoners released under a deal with the Lebanese Hezbollah group in exchange for an Israeli businessman and the bodies of three soldiers.

A Palestinian activist was killed and two others wounded late Friday in an explosion near Nablus, probably caused by a bomb they were assembling, security and medical sources said. The blast occurred in a billiard hall in the Askar refugee camp east of Nablus.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei has denounced the US policy shift as a “catastrophe.” Israeli troops shot dead a 17-year-old protester in a demonstration on Friday staged against both Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the West Bank village of Bitunia.

In another development, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri yesterday met with French President Jacques Chirac in Paris to discuss problems in the Middle East such as Iraq and tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. The two leaders, in a 90-minute meeting, focused in part on France’s hopes for the United Nations to take on a greater role in helping to resolve crises in the region, Hariri said.

“We spoke about all the regional issues,” Hariri told reporters after the meeting at the French presidential palace. He expressed hope that Iraq will remain unified, and said he did not believe a civil war was likely in the war-ravaged country. Hariri’s stop in Paris was part of a European tour; he is also to visit Germany, Belgium and Ireland.

Chirac is to hold separate talks tomorrow with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who arrived yesterday in Paris after visits to Germany and the United States, and Libyan Prime Minister Shokri Ghanem.