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Bus Carrying Freed Palestinian Prisoners Arrives in Ramallah

A cheering crowd hoisted freed Palestinian prisoners onto their shoulders after they arrived in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah - AFP
A cheering crowd hoisted freed Palestinian prisoners onto their shoulders after they arrived in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah - AFP
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Bus Carrying Freed Palestinian Prisoners Arrives in Ramallah

A cheering crowd hoisted freed Palestinian prisoners onto their shoulders after they arrived in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah - AFP
A cheering crowd hoisted freed Palestinian prisoners onto their shoulders after they arrived in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah - AFP

A bus carrying a group of Palestinian prisoners released Saturday by Israel under the Gaza ceasefire deal arrived to a cheering crowd in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, according to an AFP journalist.

Wearing traditional keffiyeh scarves, the freed prisoners were hoisted onto the crowd's shoulders. They hugged relatives before heading to a quick health checkup, the journalist reported.

Many in the crowd waved yellow flags of the Fatah movement which dominates the Palestinian Authority, while one prisoner kissed a baby as soon as he stepped off the bus.

The Israeli Prison Service confirmed it had freed 369 prisoners from the Ofer and Kziot prisons near Ramallah and Gaza respectively, after transferring them "from several prisons across the country".

Among those released in Ramallah Saturday was Amir Abu Radaha, who had spent almost 32 years in jail.

"I've returned to my family and I've returned anew, born again. Today is a new birthday", he told AFP from their home in the Al-Amari refugee camp near Ramallah.

He had been charged with intentionally causing death and being a member of an illegal organization, according to Israel's justice ministry records.

Abu Radaha said that during the time he'd spent in jail no period had been as hard as the 15 months while war had raged in Gaza.

His sister expressed joy after a sleepless night.

"I kept thinking about whether Amir would be released this time or not", she told AFP.

Unlike previous releases, the prisoners wore jackets rather than openly displaying their prison garb.

Earlier Saturday, images broadcast on Israeli public television showed Palestinian prisoners ahead of their release wearing sweatshirts featuring the prison service logo, a Star of David, and the slogan: "We do not forget and we do not forgive."

In a statement, Hamas condemned the Arabic slogan on the prisoners' sweatshirts, calling it "racist" and a "flagrant violation of humanitarian laws".

Earlier Saturday, during the release of three Israeli hostages in Khan Yunis, militants forced the captives to address onlookers in Hebrew in a choreographed release where signs carried messages in Hebrew, Arabic and English.

Elior Levy, a commentator on Israel's public broadcaster, criticized the prison service's use of the uniforms as "stupid and infantile".

"This very idiotic act puts Israel in the same line as Hamas' grotesque gestures in releasing the hostages," he wrote on X.

The Palestinian Prisoners' Club advocacy group had said Israel was to release 369 inmates in the latest exchange.

The inmates were freed in exchange for three Israelis held hostage in Gaza. It was the latest such swap under a January 19 ceasefire deal that ended more than 15 months of war ignited by Hamas's unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.

Israel had warned Hamas that it must free three living hostages this weekend or face a resumption of the war, after the group said it would pause releases over what it described as Israeli violations of the Gaza truce.

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Arab World

Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.