There has been much talk recently about the possibility of completing a prisoner exchange deal between the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian resistance, as each party seeks to obtain significant gains from that deal to achieve the goals that each wants.
The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth recently quoted a security official as saying that Israel’s problem is not in the number of Palestinian prisoners to be released, but rather in the quality, at a time when the occupation repeats that it will not release Palestinian prisoners, whom it describes as “blood on their hands.”
Observers believe that it is not easy now to reach an exchange deal, because the occupation still believes that its prisoners are among the dead, at a time when the resistance insists that it does not have the release of major prisoners, and that any information for the occupation must come at a price.
revenge and reaction
In turn, the director of the Jerusalem Center for Israeli Studies, Imad Abu Awad, believes that the occupation will eventually acquiesce in the demands of the resistance, because there must be a price to pay to return its soldiers, and the problem lies in the Israeli mentality, which is not afraid of the released person, but rather the reaction of the person after his long years of detention .
According to Abu Awwad, the occupation’s philosophy of detention was based on two things: revenge against the captive who carried out a certain operation, and the other matter is that this person, after being punished or imprisoned for many years, becomes a lesson for those after him so that the methods of resistance are not repeated until the idea that the price will be heavy.
Abu Awad tells Al Jazeera Net that the occupation is afraid to release people who could add something to the resistance, such as Abdullah Barghouti, the engineer and an expert in explosives, and for fear that they will return to the resistance again and carry out qualitative operations that hurt the occupation, or transfer their experiences directly to the new generation of resistance, and this It contradicts the principle of revenge against them, which must continue even if it costs the occupation to arrest them for tens of years.
critical operations
In the end, Israel will understand that there will be a price for releasing its prisoners, because the goal is to return its soldiers and end internal pressure, and even if there is an objection to this price, these attempts will reach the release of prisoners.
And about the presence of certain Israeli political figures who achieve the exchange deal and release the senior prisoners, Abu Awad tells Al Jazeera Net that the reliance on the final decisions of the exchange deal is made by the Israeli security services and not at the level of names, meaning that if Netanyahu decides to release the Palestinian prisoners in his last days of The ruling, any subsequent Israeli government will abide by the decision, because the matter becomes national security.
Abu Awwad ends his speech by saying that the prisoner exchange operations are critical and are linked to many details, but the resistance in Gaza today has become strong, and it can impose its conditions by releasing big names that the occupation did not submit to their release previously, such as Abdullah Al-Barghouti, who has the longest life sentences, and a leader in Fath Marwan Barghouti, as well as the leader of the Popular Front, Ahmed Saadat, and many big names, because the resistance today has a long breath in dealing with the occupation, and it has cards of power and pressure to achieve its conditions and impose them.
Records of renunciation
For his part, the director of the “Ahrar” Center for Human Rights, Fouad Al-Khuffash, believes that the Israeli occupation places red lines, especially on prisoners with high sentences who were more harming and killing soldiers or settlers and spilling their blood, and because any release of them would constitute great internal Israeli pressure.
And the occupation announced more than once that it categorically refuses to release prisoners who have been sentenced to life imprisonment and for many years, while the Palestinian resistance insists on releasing certain names.
According to Al-Khuffash, not every party can achieve all its demands, but the Palestinian resistance, if the occupation is intransigent in releasing certain names, has the conviction – according to the experiences of previous deals – that it can give up at a later time or a future deal on names that he described as dangerous, and this is what It happened when he refused to release some names in the Ahmed Jibril deal in 1985, but he released the same names in the “Wafa Al-Ahrar” or “Shalit” deal in 2011.
In his speech to Al-Jazeera Net, Al-Khuffash believes that the problem in releasing big names among the prisoners is that the time periods between exchange deals are long, and although the Palestinian resistance tried at various stages – whether in the first or second intifada – to complete prisoner exchange deals with the occupation, they were not at the level What is required, and here lies the conviction of the Palestinians that the release of detainees with high sentences can only be achieved through exchange deals.
The problem also lies in the mediators between the two parties, according to Al-Khuffash, because their role does not end with mutual release, but rather a guarantee of the implementation of the conditions after that, and this matter was negative in the “Shalit” deal, in which the occupation did not abide by its terms, and re-arrested 60 people in its prisons with the same previous provisions before the deal.