Cheering Crowds Greet Palestinian Prisoners Freed by Israel

Newly released Palestinian prisoners flashed victory signs to cheering crowds who gathered on Monday to watch them step into freedom under the new cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas.

Families waited at dawn in the West Bank city of Ramallah and broke into teary-eyed trills as buses carrying some of the nearly 2,000 released prisoners and detainees approached. They rushed forward to greet the men as they stepped off. Many of the men looked haggard and exhausted.

“This feeling is indescribable,” said Nasser Shehadeh, who was released after serving three years of a 17-year sentence for a car ramming attack on two soldiers, who survived. He was told he would be freed three days ago, and said the news came as a surprise.

“I haven’t slept since that moment,” he said.

On Monday afternoon, the Israeli prison service said it had freed all of the 1,968 Palestinians slated for release in an exchange for all the remaining hostages in Gaza. They were sent to the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

Among those freed were 250 Palestinians convicted of terrorism offenses or acts of violence against Israelis and roughly 1,700 more who were detained in Gaza without charge during the war.

The 250 convicts were mostly affiliated with Fatah, a rival Palestinian faction to Hamas, and were serving life sentences for attacks in the 1980s or 1990s.

More than 150 of them were sent into exile. The Gaza residents among them were taken through the Rafah border crossing which links Gaza to Egypt, according to the Hamas Prisoners’ Media Office.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said one prisoner was transferred to Ramallah Hospital from Ofer Prison, while seven others were hospitalized after they were dropped off in Ramallah.

Mr. Shehadeh’s father, Bilal, said he was disturbed by his son’s condition. They had not seen each other since the war began more than two years ago, and in that time, his son had lost roughly 100 pounds.

“They were not just deprived of food. They were not even allowed to clean themselves or to have soap,” the father said. “Our priority now is to make sure Nasser gets the medical attention he needs.”

Halima Abu Shanab, 53, said she was both overjoyed and alarmed by the sight of her brother, Kamal Abu Shanab. The Israeli authorities said he was convicted of murder and membership in a terrorist organization.

“We’re happy, truly happy, that he’s home,” she said. “But his health, it’s really bad. I was not prepared to see him like this.”

Mr. Abu Shanab, 51, had spent 23 years in prison. When he emerged from the bus on Monday, he was covered in bruises, Ms. Abu Shanab said. She added that he had a shoulder injury that had not been treated in eight months. His family took him directly to a hospital.

“He was beaten badly and humiliated,” she said. “And left with wounds on his knees and body.”

The Israel Prison Service said it was not aware of the family’s claims of mistreatment made by the released prisoners and detainees on Monday.

“The Israel Prison Service operates in accordance with the law,” a spokesman for the agency said. “We are not aware of the claims described, and to the best of our knowledge, no such incidents occurred under I.P.S. responsibility.”

In 2011, Israel exchanged more than 1,000 prisoners and detainees for Gilad Shalit, a soldier who had been held captive in Gaza for five years. Several of those released prisoners and detainees — including Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who was killed last year — would go on to plan the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack.

One of the prisoners and detainees released in 2011 was Murad Abdallah Adais, who was convicted of killing Dafna Meir in 2016. Her daughter, Renana Meir, criticized his release in an anguished essay in an Israeli newspaper.

“When the terrorist is let out of prison in the coming agreement, you will pay the price,” she wrote. “Every Israeli in every house in Israel will be less safe.”

Others had more mixed feelings.

Abraham Moses, 75, the chairman of Israel’s National Organization of Victims of Terror, said he and his children wept when they learned that Muhammad Adel Daoud would be freed. He was convicted in 1989 of killing Mr. Moses’s wife, Ofra, and 5-year-old son, Tal, in 1987.

But then Mr. Moses decided that if seeing Mr. Daoud go free could save the families of hostages from that same pain, then his release might be worth it.

“Imagine the feeling of families who would embrace their loved ones returning from hell,” he said.

Some of the families who were waiting in Ramallah for their imprisoned loved ones left despondent on Monday after learning that their relatives were not among those released.

Nuhad Hammami waited anxiously in Ramallah for her brother, Mohammed, who was convicted of murder, according to the Israeli authorities. She stood on her toes to see over the crowd. Then tears began to stream down her face.

“His name was on the list of prisoners returning home until this morning,” she said. “Then the list changed, and now we don’t know if we’ll ever see him again.”

She was worried that he might have been released and sent to Gaza instead of the West Bank.

“Where would he sleep in the winter?” she said, her voice trembling. “Gaza is destroyed.”

Most of the released prisoners were residents of Gaza who were detained without charge during the war, including women and children. They were brought to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, where such large crowds gathered that the buses could barely move down the street.

The area around the hospital swelled with thousands of people and coursed with waves of joy, grief and disbelief. Armed men, some of them masked, tried in vain to keep order in the crowd, occasionally firing into the air.

Many in the crowd pushed toward the arriving busloads of detainees and shouted the names of their missing loved ones. Others packed the balconies of half destroyed buildings to cheer and wave.

Inside the buses, detainees pressed against the windows or waved back.

Israel has detained several hundred Palestinians during the war on suspicion of direct involvement in the Oct. 7 attacks. It has detained thousands more who are suspected of links to Hamas and other groups but not of involvement in the attack.

Most were designated as “unlawful combatants,” which means they can be held without charge or trial under Israeli law. Some of these detainees were released in earlier prisoner-hostage swaps during the war.

When the Israeli government agreed to the exchange, it stipulated that no detainees suspected of involvement in the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks would be released.

Rozan Naif Adwa, 23, came to find her fiancé, Mohammed Khalil, who was detained at a checkpoint in northern Gaza 11 months ago. They had planned to distribute their wedding invitations on Oct. 7, 2023, and had spent the last two years watching the destruction of their homeland.

“He came out of one small prison to a bigger one, a devastated prison,” she said, referring to Gaza. “But he will rebuild his home and his life from the beginning.”

Earlier in the day, Amani Nasir, 30, joined a crowd in southern Gaza to watch Red Cross vehicles take some of the freed hostages back to Israel. She knew their release meant that Palestinian prisoners and detainees would be coming home soon.

“Today feels like the happiest day of our lives,” said Ms. Nasir, who fled her home in northern Gaza during the two-year war. Since then, she said, she had been displaced 19 more times to flee fighting.

“We were happy for our prisoners — and for the Israelis, too,” she said. “We love peace and the truce. Just as Israelis worry about their hostages, we worry about our prisoners.”