OCCUPIED JERUSALEM/GAZA, 6 August 2003 — Excited relatives were yesterday preparing modest ceremonies to welcome home Palestinian prisoners about to be freed by Israel, their joy tempered by regrets that many more will remain in jail.
In Israel, the decision to release 342 prisoners today left many people incredulous. Some Israelis welcomed it as a peace offering, but relatives of victims of suicide attacks were struggling to come to terms with it.
“The release, to us, seems both immoral and impossible,” said Pnina Aizenman, who lost her mother and five-year-old daughter in a Jerusalem suicide bombing in June last year. “I feel really bad about the release and I think all the bereaved families feel the same way,” said Aizenman, who survived the attack along with her two-year-old son.
Israel published yesterday the names of the prisoners it plans to free in efforts to bolster a US-backed peace plan. None was convicted for involvement in attacks during the 34-month-old Palestinian uprising for independence.
The Palestinians had expected 540 prisoners would be freed and want an amnesty for all 6,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails. “We are happy but had hoped that all prisoners would be released,” said Sami Abu Daqqa, a Palestinian in the Gaza Strip.
His brother Abdallah, jailed in January 2002 for membership of the radical Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is among those scheduled to be released today. Some Palestinians are planning simple welcome gestures for the prisoners. In Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, Tayseer Abu Shammala’s five children prepared for his return by decorating their home with flowers and paper hearts bearing the inscription: “I love you.”
Dalia, 10, said the world seemed a better place now that her father, detained without charge in April, was coming home. “Without him I felt like an orphan,” she said. But her mother Yusra said happiness would be complete only after Israel set free all the other prisoners. Aizenman’s home in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Maaleh Adumim is decorated with photographs of the daughter and mother she lost in June 2002. She said the planned release had shaken her faith in the government.
“The two children I have left — the one I had after the attack and the one who survived — are in danger because these prisoners, who helped prepare a bomb or helped some other way, will now be able to hurt my family again,” she said.
A few grieving Israelis welcome the release as a step toward peace and reconciliation. Roni Hershenson, who lost his son Amir in a 1995 bombing and his son Elad in 2000 when he committed suicide after his best friend was killed in an attack, said steps such as the prisoner release were the only way to stop the violence.
“Every step that minimizes the hostility between the two peoples is welcome and desirable,” he said. “I support the prisoner release and its expansion as the peace process moves forward.”
Israel’s security services, meanwhile, arrested 47 mainly foreign opponents of its controversial security barrier yesterday as they tried to halt construction through a Palestinian family’s garden in the West Bank, sources said. But despite the protests and mounting criticism of the project from the United States, a new poll found that Israeli public support for the barrier remained overwhelming.
Troops burst into the house of the Amar family in the village of Mashah as well as the garden where the protestors had erected a tent, activists and military sources told AFP. Authorities had declared the area “a closed military zone”.
Those arrested included 41 members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and six Israelis. Some of the foreign activists were from the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Sweden. Lysander Puccio from New York told AFP the group of 47 was rounded up by the army and taken to the police station of the nearby Jewish settlement of Ariel.
