CAIRO (AP) — As talks on a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release gather pace, Hamas is expected to seek the release of some of the highest-profile prisoners held by Israel, including the most popular and potentially unifying Palestinian political figure: Marwan Barghouti.
Israel views Barghouti and the others as terrorist masterminds who murdered Israeli civilians and has refused to release them in past exchanges. But it faces mounting pressure to end
the war and bring back the remaining 48 hostages taken in Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack, around 20 of them believed to be alive.
Many Palestinians view the thousands of prisoners held by Israel as political prisoners or freedom fighters resisting decades of military occupation.
Israel fears history will repeat itself after it released senior Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in a 2011 exchange. The long-serving prisoner was one of the main architects of the Oct. 7 attack and went on to lead the militant group before he was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza last year.
Here's a look at some of the prisoners believed to be at the top of a list Hamas says it submitted to mediators this week.
For several years, polls have shown that the 66-year-old Barghouti is the most popular Palestinian political figure and suggest he would handily win presidential elections, which haven't been held since 2005.
He's far more popular than Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and seen as someone who could succeed him and potentially mend the longstanding rift between Abbas' Fatah movement and Hamas. Some have even compared him to Nelson Mandela, who was jailed for 27 years before becoming South Africa's first Black president.
Barghouti was a senior Fatah leader in the Israeli-occupied West Bank during the intifada, or Palestinian uprising, that erupted in 2000, and Israel says he orchestrated attacks that killed several people. He was arrested in 2002 and later given five life sentences. He offered no defense, refusing to recognize the Israeli court's legitimacy.
He supports the creation of a Palestinian state in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, territories Israel seized in the 1967 Mideast war, something Israel's current government and most of its political class oppose.
The Kuwait-born Barghouti, with no direct relation to Marwan, was a senior Hamas bombmaker and commander during the 2000 intifada who was implicated in several notorious attacks on Israeli civilians, mainly in Jerusalem.
An Israeli court handed him 67 life sentences in 2004 — the longest sentence handed down in the country's history — after he was convicted of attacks that killed 66 people, including five Americans, and wounded more than 500.
Now in his early 50s, he was convicted of making the bombs used in an attack at the Hebrew University in which five Americans and four Israelis were killed, a suicide bombing at a branch of the Sbarro pizzeria that killed 15 people, a suicide bombing at a cafe that left 11 dead and a triple bombing on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall that killed 10.
In the sentencing, the judges wrote that they regretted that the death penalty was not an option. The only death penalty Israel has carried out was that of Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann in 1962.
The leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a small leftist faction with an armed wing, was accused of organizing the 2001 assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, an ultranationalist who called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians.
Saadat and four PFLP activists directly involved in the killing were eventually arrested by Palestinian police. In April 2002, a makeshift court hastily convened in then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s West Bank compound sentenced the four to prison terms ranging from one to 18 years. Saadat was not charged, with Palestinian officials saying at the time they did not believe he was involved in the killing.
In an internationally-brokered agreement that year, he was transferred to a Palestinian jail in the West Bank city of Jericho. In 2006, fearing he might be released, Israel raided the prison and took him and other Palestinians into custody. He was sentenced to 30 years in 2008. He is now in his early 70s.
Hassan Salama, a senior Hamas militant, was given 46 life sentences in 1997 stemming from the bombing of two commuter buses in Jerusalem and another attack that together killed and wounded dozens of people.
He led a series of revenge attacks after the assassination of Hamas' chief bombmaker, Yahya Ayyash, in 1996. Salama, now in his early 50s, was arrested later that year.
Hamas carried out several major attacks on Israeli civilians in the 1990s, when Israel and Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization were engaged in U.S.-brokered peace talks.
Those negotiations repeatedly broke down, often in the aftermath of attacks and over Israel's expansion of settlements. No substantive negotiations have been held since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office in 2009.
Al-Sayyed, now in his late 50s, was a senior Hamas commander in the West Bank during the 2000 intifada and was implicated in the deadliest attack of the uprising.
He was given 35 life sentences and another 100 years over his role in multiple attacks, including a suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in the coastal city of Netanya in March 2002 that killed 30 people and wounded 140 others as they celebrated the Jewish Passover.
That attack marked the peak of the uprising and led Israel to launch major military operations across the occupied West Bank.
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