Palestinians cheer as freed prisoners begin to arrive home under ceasefire deal

Joyous Palestinians rushed to embrace prisoners freed under a U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement as they arrived by bus to the occupied West Bank and Gaza on Monday.

The prisoners were released after the Hamas militant group freed the last 20 living hostages taken during the October 7, 2023 attacks that precipitated the war in Gaza.

Under the deal, Israel is set to release 250 Palestinians convicted of murder and other serious crimes as well as 1,700 Palestinians detained in Gaza since the war began, 22 Palestinian minors, and the bodies of 360 militants.

Several thousand people gathered inside and around the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, awaiting the arrival of freed prisoners, with some waving Palestinian flags and others holding pictures of their relatives.

Fighting back tears, one woman who asked to be identified as Um Ahmed said she said that despite her joy at the release, she still had "mixed feelings" about the day.   

"I am happy for our sons who are being freed, but we are still in pain for all the those who had been killed by the occupation, and all the destruction that happened to our Gaza," she told Reuters by voice note.

Freed prisoners arrived in buses, some of them posing from the windows, flashing V-for-Victory signs. They will undergo medical checks at the facility.

Earlier, about a dozen masked and black-clad gunmen, members of Hamas' armed wing, arrived at the hospital where a stage and chairs had been laid out to welcome returning Palestinian prisoners. Loudspeakers blared songs celebrating the Palestinian national cause.

Hamas said 154 prisoners were also deported to Egypt.

In Ramallah, in the Israeli occupied West Bank, Samer Halabeya, a doctor freed from jail where he was serving a sentence for planning an attack that wounded an Israeli officer, said the prisoners had only learned they would be released long after the agreement had been signed. 

"We hope that everyone gets freed," he told Reuters as he stood next to his weeping mother.

Mohammad Al-Khatib, who had spent 20 years in an Israeli prison for killing three Israelis, said he couldn't believe he would soon be united with his family in Bethlehem. He had last seen his two girls and two boys when they visited him 30 months ago, he said.

"We have always had hope, that's why we continued to be steadfast," Khatib told Reuters.

Those released do not include senior Hamas commanders or some of the most prominent figures from other factions, leading relatives of some detainees to say the deal did not go far enough.

Tala Al Barghouti, daughter of Abdallah Al-Barghouti, a Hamas militant sentenced to 67 life terms in 2004, said the agreement had left "deep pain and questions that will not end".

The deal "sacrificed those who played the greatest role in the resistance and closed hopes of their release", she wrote on Facebook. Her father was jailed for his involvement in a series of suicide attacks in 2001 and 2002 that killed dozens of Israelis.

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