After 45 years arrested, Palestinian is released in the final exchange between Israel and Hamas

Nael Barghouti was first arrested in 1978 and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of an Israeli officer and attacks on Israeli locations.

At the time, he was a member of Fatah, the movement of the current Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas, based in Ramallah, West Bank, and rival of the Islamist Hamas Movement, which governs Gaza since 2007.

The exchange of Israeli hostages to Palestinian prisoners, which took place on Thursday morning, was the seventh and last in the first phase of the current truce between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, which began on January 19 after 15 months of war.

Israel’s Penitentiary Administration confirmed on Thursday that 643 Palestinian detainees were released from various arrests of the country under the terms of the truce agreement after Hamas delivered the bodies of four hostages kidnapped in the attack of this Islam movement to Israel on October 7, 2023, which triggered the war in Gaza.

The first phase of the agreement, which should expire on Saturday, allowed the return to Israel of 33 hostages, including eight dead, and the release, according to Hamas, of about 1,700 Palestinian prisoners, of a planned total of 1,900.

Nael Barghouti was first released in 2011 as part of an exchange of Palestinian prisoners by an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas and placed in house arrest in Kubar, West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967.