RAMALLAH, West Bank, 19 July 2007 — Amal has barely managed to sleep since hearing Israel is to release her husband, political leader Abdel-Rahim Mallouh, along with more than 250 other prisoners as a gesture to President Mahmoud Abbas. A top official of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Mallouh, 61, has been held by Israel since 2002. He has more than two years left of a jail sentence imposed for being a member of an illegal organization.

Amal Mallouh said she has been counting the hours and minutes since Monday when Abbas called her to say she would soon see her husband again. Mallouh is one of 256 prisoners held in Israeli jails due to start being freed today.

“The (remaining) two days are like two years,” said the 51-year-old mother. “We miss him dreadfully,” she added, looking at his picture with late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. In a bid to bolster the Western-backed Abbas, Israel on Tuesday finalized a list of prisoners to be freed. About 85 percent of them are inmates belonging to Abbas’ Fatah faction.

“The minute he is freed, he will go back to his work. He is a political leader not a killer. He is defending his cause,” said his son, Sharif, 26. Amal said she had endured hard times as she tried to provide for her four teenage children without their father.

“I have a dual role: that of the father and the mother,” the housewife said with a broad smile while sitting at home, surrounded by Palestinian flags and huge posters of Mallouh and Marwan Al-Barghouthi, a Fatah uprising leader seen as a possible future successor to Abbas but who remains in an Israeli jail.

Olmert has pledged to free the prisoners in a bid to shore up Abbas’ new government against Hamas Islamists who triumphed in parliamentary elections last year, then routed his forces to take over Gaza last month. “Freedom for the prisoners of freedom,” read a phrase, written underneath one poster of Mallouh and Barghouthi.

The prisoners issue is highly emotive for Palestinians, who see their 11,000 brothers held in Israeli jails as fighters for freedom from occupation in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Israel has stepped up arrest campaigns during the Palestinian uprising that flared after peace talks finally broke down in 2001.

Sharif, his eyes welling with tears, said he felt his father’s absence most when he graduated from a university in Egypt two years ago. But Karmel, his 21-year-old daughter, an interior design student who will graduate next year from a Jordanian university, said she was lucky because her dream will come true: Mallouh promised in a letter that he will attend her graduation. “I will feel I am not alone,” said a beaming Karmel.

But a group representing Israeli victims of Palestinian violence asked the Supreme Court yesterday to delay the planned release of the prisoners. The Almagor group said more time is needed to review the files of the prisoners before the release.

“From an initial inspection of the list, there are already some names of terrorists whose release is unreasonable,” the group’s leader, Meir Eindor, wrote in a letter. On its Internet website, Almagor 179 Israelis have been killed since 2000 by Palestinians freed in previous deals.