CLOSE TO 100 sad, ageing women crowded into the front courtyard of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) here yesterday, clutching photographs of their sons and husbands in Israeli prisons.
The Israel-Hamas ceasefire has raised hopes of a prisoner exchange. In the war, 100 Palestinians were killed for every Israeli. The ratio however works to the Palestinians’ advantage in hostage swaps. Hamas hopes to obtain the freedom of up to 400 prisoners in exchange for the Franco-Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit it holds.
“We will release all the women in Israeli jails. This is our main demand,” shouts a young man. Abu Mujahed, spokesman for Hamas’s Popular Resistance, tells me there are 150 women and 350 boys under the age of 18 among 11,000 Palestinians held in Israel.
It is a violation of the fourth Geneva Convention for Israel to move prisoners from occupied territory to Israel, the ICRC says.
“Shalit will not be the only soldier,” Abu Mujahed harangues the female crowd. “We will kidnap more soldiers to release our prisoners. We captured some during the aggression three-week war, but the Israelis killed them in bombardments,” he continues.
Nawal Salem (50) frets that her son Rami, who is serving a 16-year sentence for laying land mines and shooting at Israeli soldiers, worried terribly about his family in Gaza during the war. When the prisoners write home, they beg the women to speak to them on thrice-weekly broadcasts on Palestinian radio stations entitled: “We will not forget our prisoners”.
Majda Haddad (49) attends every meeting of the Association to Free Prisoners, “even on feast days, even during the bombing, because it gives me strength”. Her son Ra’ed (29) has served half his 14-year sentence.
“He’s with the [Fatah] al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. They sent him to southern Lebanon to train for a month with Hizbullah. The Israelis grabbed him at the Rafah crossing, on his way home.”
Two foreign guests are treated like celebrities.
Sami el-Haj, the Sudanese journalist for al-Jazeera television whom US forces arrested in Afghanistan in 2001, has come from Guantánamo (where he was freed last May) to Gaza out of solidarity, and Magdi Hussein, an Egyptian Islamist and scholar who is close to the Muslim Brotherhood.