RAMALLAH, 22 February 2005 — In the largest mass release for nearly a decade, Israel freed 500 Palestinian prisoners yesterday.

US President George W. Bush, in a speech in Brussels, urged Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to “put forward a strategy of reform” when a London conference convenes next month on financial support for the Palestinian Authority following Yasser Arafat’s death.

“I hope he will seize the moment,” said Bush, who has pressed Palestinians for years to revamp their often competing security forces and fight corruption.

But Abbas faced a political crisis over shaping a new reform-minded Cabinet.

Even as Abbas’ hand was strengthened by jubilant scenes of homecoming for former detainees, Palestinian lawmakers opposed to the makeup of his new Cabinet forced a delay of at least a day in a vote to ratify his government.

He and Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei held talks with lawmakers from their dominant Fatah faction after complaints that the proposed Cabinet contained few new faces.

“Reform is part of Abbas’ program and we are committed to this policy,” Nabil Abu Rudeinah, a Palestinian Authority spokesman, said about Bush’s remarks.

But, Abu Rudeinah said, the most important thing was to revive a US-backed road map, which charts mutual steps toward creation of a Palestinian state beside a secure Israel.

Prospects for peacemaking have brightened since Abbas succeeded Arafat on a platform of nonviolence and persuaded fighters to abide by a de facto truce.

Israel’s prisoner release, its biggest since freeing 800 in 1996, was part of a package of confidence-building measures Abbas agreed with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at a Feb. 8 summit in Egypt.

But the mood of celebration was tempered by Palestinian demands for even larger prisoner releases to help Abbas get armed groups to formalize the cease-fire he reached with Sharon.

Israel still holds about 8,000 prisoners and says it will free 400 after a joint committee with the Palestinians finalizes a roster.

Abbas vowed to make winning freedom for all jailed Palestinians the “top of our priorities”, but Israel has refused to release prisoners “with blood on their hands”.

“We feel pain because we left our brothers ... in jail,” said Islamic Jihad member Hassan Abu Armana, who served two years in Israeli prisons. “There will be no peace, no security, no stability without the release of all prisoners.”

The detainees were freed a day after Sharon’s Cabinet approved a pullout from the Gaza Strip, the first time Israel has decided to dismantle settlements on land Palestinians want for a state.

Palestinians welcomed the Gaza withdrawal, slated to begin on July 20, but were angry at Israel’s simultaneous decision to endorse a route for a wall looping deep into the West Bank to take in major settlement blocs near Jerusalem.

Palestinians call it an attempt to grab land they want for a state.

In his Brussels address, Bush repeated a call to Israel to “freeze all settlement activity” and reaffirmed a US commitment to the creation of a viable Palestinian state with contiguous territory in the West Bank.

Bush outlined a similar vision of statehood in a letter to Sharon last April in which the president also wrote that “new realities on the ground”, an indirect reference to settlements, made total Israeli withdrawal from occupied land unrealistic.

— With input from agencies