Israel, Seeking to Give Abbas a Boost, Frees 159 Palestinians

In an apparent effort to bolster the standing of the moderate interim Palestinian government led by Mahmoud Abbas, Israel on Monday freed 159 Palestinian prisoners.

But Palestinian officials -- including Abbas, the front-runner in the Jan. 9 presidential election -- said the Israeli gesture, while welcome, was insufficient.

Most of the freed Palestinian prisoners were either near the end of their jail terms or had been incarcerated for relatively minor offenses, such as being in Israel illegally.

Nonetheless, the prisoner release brought happiness to the families of the freed men. Women wept with joy and small children launched themselves toward fathers they might barely have remembered. Car horns honked in celebration.

The freed men, who had been loaded onto buses at a prison in southern Israel before dawn, flashed V-for-victory signs as they passed through Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Some kissed the ground after clambering down from the prison vehicles.

For a majority of Palestinians, the release of prisoners takes precedence over many other disputes with Israel. Almost every Palestinian family has had a member incarcerated, particularly during the last four years of violence, and prisoners are widely revered as heroes in the struggle against Israeli occupation.

Abbas, who formally launched his election campaign for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority on Saturday, said many more Palestinians behind bars in Israel must be freed.

“I respect the release of every prisoner, but we need a serious release procedure,” Abbas told reporters in the West Bank town of Ramallah. “We seek the freedom of those who have spent long years in jail.”

Palestinians said that of those freed Monday, 46 had been in jail for overstaying their permits to be inside Israel and the rest were held for so-called security offenses. Most of the latter had been jailed for membership in a militant group such as Hamas, but only a handful had taken part in violent activities.

As a rule, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government is highly resistant to freeing prisoners with “blood on their hands” -- those involved in attacks that killed Israelis. Sharon’s previous refusal to allow large-scale prisoner releases cost Abbas popular support while he was briefly the Palestinian Authority prime minister last year, contributing in large measure to his resignation from that post.

In addition to being a nod to Abbas, Monday’s prisoner release was intended to demonstrate goodwill toward Egypt, which this month freed an Israeli Arab businessman it had jailed for eight years on spy charges.

Sharon, meanwhile, sought Monday to accelerate the timetable of his planned withdrawal of Israeli troops and Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. He told lawmakers that he would seek final Cabinet approval for the pullout by February, earlier than expected.

Israeli media quoted lawmakers as saying the speedup was prompted by Atty. Gen. Menachem Mazuz, who had told Sharon that for legal purposes, the settlers should be given at least six months’ formal warning that their communities would be uprooted.

Despite the relative lull in violence since Yasser Arafat’s death Nov. 11, two Palestinians died in separate incidents Monday. Israeli troops killed a wanted man in the West Bank, and in the Gaza Strip, a Hamas member died in a “work accident” -- a term for the premature explosion of a bomb while it is being assembled.