‘Sentenced to life’, ‘detained without trial’: Who are the Palestinian prisoners being released by Israel?

Who all have been released?

The first set of 90 prisoners released on Sunday included 69 women and 21 teenage boys. Among those freed was Khalida Jarrar, 62, a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The group, a secular leftist faction, was involved in attacks against Israel in the 1970s and known for aeroplane hijackings. The PFLP is believed to have participated alongside Hamas in the October 7 attacks.

Jarrar was arrested by Israel in late 2023 and was held under indefinitely renewable administrative detention, according to news agency AP.

According to local media reports, Israel’s Ministry of Justice has also released a list of 734 more prisoners set to be released in the first phase of the deal. As many as 230 of these, including high-profile people, were sentenced to life. The 734 prisoners also include many of the 1,167 Palestinians detained in Gaza since the start of the war in 2023.

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Several of these prisoners have spent decades in detention, even long before the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993. The 1993 agreement was part of the Arab-Israeli peace process that saw Israel recognising the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a formal representative of the Palestinians. The PLO, in turn, renounced terror activities. However, peace negotiations fell through by the end of 2000.

The controversial detention law

Human rights bodies and experts have criticised Israel’s administrative detention law that allows it to incarcerate people without trial for an unspecified period. The rule applies to Israeli citizens under the Emergency Powers (Detentions) Law. It has been used extensively against Palestinians in Occupied Territories and, in some cases, Israelis settled in the West Bank.

Freed Palestinian prisoners ride in a bus after their release from the Israeli military prison, Ofer, near Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, January 20, 2025. (Reuters)

According to B’Tselem, an Israeli non-profit human rights body, under administrative detention, no legal proceedings are held against the detainee. The individual is incarcerated on the order of the military based on “classified evidence”, which is not revealed to the detainee itself. The law allows a military commander to detain an individual for six months if the commander has “reasonable grounds to believe that reasons of regional security or public security require that a certain person be held in detention”. The commander may extend the detention for another six months. There is no stipulation in the law for the total time period an individual can be detained.

Israel has also been invoking the controversial Detention of Unlawful Combatants Law (UCL) against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip after it withdrew from the region in 2005. The law came into being in 2002 and allows the Israeli military to detain any “person who takes part in hostile activity against the State of Israel, directly or indirectly, or belongs to a force engaged in hostile activity against the State of Israel”. The UCL has been amended twice since the October 7, 2023, attacks.

In December 2023, the law was amended to allow the State to issue a detention order within 45 days instead of 96 hours after the issuance of a temporary detention order. It extended the period after which a detainee can be brought before a judge from 14 days to 75 days. The July 2024 amendment reduced this flexibility to some extent. The State can now take up to 30 days to issue a detention order and has 45 days to bring the detainee in front of a judge.

Several women were released as part of a hostages-prisoners swap and a ceasefire deal in Gaza between Hamas and Israel, in Ramallah (Reuters)

Several human rights experts, whistleblowers, and released prisoners have spoken about the torture of detained Palestinians in Israeli prisons and detention facilities.

What the numbers tell

While there are disputed figures on the actual number of detainees held in Israel, non-governmental and human rights bodies peg the figure to over 10,000. According to HaMoked, an independent human rights NGO, as many as 3,376 of these are “administrative detainees” and 1,886 people are “unlawful combatants”.

B’Tselem stated that before the war started, 5,192 Palestinians were held on “security grounds”. Of these, as many as 1,319 were held without trial as “administrative detainees.” However, as of July 2024, the number nearly doubled. As many as 9,623 Palestinians were jailed in prisons and detention facilities. Of these, 4,781 were detained without trial or charges.

B’Tselem stated that as of 2020, the Israel Prison System stopped providing figures on detainees to the NGO and instead publishes them on their website every three months. Some of the data was found to be “partial” by the NGO.