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Roundup: Palestinians mark Prisoner's Day, Hamas says ready for swap deal with Israel

Xinhua, April 17, 2016 Adjust font size:

The Palestinians on Sunday marked the Prisoner's Day with a series of popular activities and rallies, calling on the international community to press Israel to release thousands of prisoners in its jails.

Abu Obeida, the always-masked spokesman for Hamas' armed wing al-Qassam Brigades, said in a news briefing to mark the day that his movement prepares for a prisoner swap deal with Israel and promised that the prisoners will soon see the light of freedom.

The Palestinian Prisoner's Day, which falls on April 17, goes back to 1974, when the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the parliament of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), convened in Cairo, where hundreds of prisoners back then had been on a hunger strike for more than 45 days, one of them died.

On Sunday, supporters and leaders of various Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Fatah Party, as well as community leaders organized rallies and demonstrations all over the Palestinian territories, the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem to mark the day.

Israel detains 7,000 Palestinians, including 70 women, in 22 prisons, jails and detention camps, according to a recent survey by the Palestinian Center for Prisoners Studies.

The survey said that since early October last year, Israel has arrested 4,800 Palestinians, including 400 children, most of them from East Jerusalem and from the southern West Bank city of Hebron.

The corporation's survey asserted that the Israeli measures of arrests "are illegal and violates the human laws" in terms of circumstances of arrests, places where the prisoners are held and interrogations tactics.

About 750 Palestinians are under administrative detention and 700 prisoners suffer from various diseases, the survey said.

It further said that during 2015, two prisoners died in jail, adding "they were sick and the prisons services did not provide them with the medicine they needed."

It added that since 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, 207 prisoners have died in Israeli jails, where Israel had since then arrested around one million Palestinians, most of them were released after they spent their terms in jail.

The PLO negotiations affairs department issued a media brief on Israel's arrest and confinement policy targeting Palestinian children.

"The children are regularly subjected to ill-treatment, torture, physical and psychological violence during the arrest, interrogation, detention and/or under home arrest," the PLO negotiations department said in an official statement emailed to reporters.

Spokesman Abu Obeida said in a short news briefing that his group "has something in hand that can help finalize soon a prisoner swap deal with Israel.

Abu Obeida was referring to four missing Israeli soldiers, still unknown if they are alive or dead. They have been missing in Israel's air and ground military operation against the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014.

In Oct. 2010, Egypt brokered a prisoner swap deal between Hamas and Israel, where Hamas freed a captive Israeli soldier called Gilad Shalit who was captured in Gaza in 2006, for the release of 10,28 male and female Palestinian prisoners. Endit