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Israel rules out Marwan Barghouti’s release as Hamas says Netanyahu seeking to ‘blow up truce’

The Cradle | October 9, 2025

Israel will not release prominent Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti as part of a prisoner exchange deal accompanying the ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza, an Israeli government spokesperson announced on 9 October.

“I can tell you at this point in time that he will not be part of this release,” spokesperson Shosh Bedrosian stated in a press conference on Thursday, as the ceasefire is expected to take effect.

However, Palestinian sources told Al Jazeera and Ynet that Barghouti’s case is still on the table, and Hamas is pressing hard for his release.

Barghouti is a prominent Palestinian legislator and leader of Fatah, a nationalist political party that dominates the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

After surviving multiple assassination attempts by Israeli intelligence, Barghouti was imprisoned during the Second Intifada in 2002.

He is serving five life sentences, allegedly for organizing attacks that killed five Israelis.

After his conviction was announced, Barghouti stated in Hebrew, “This is a court of occupation that I do not recognize … A day will come when you will be ashamed of these accusations … I have no more connection to these charges than you, the judges, do.”

Barghouti penned a book while imprisoned in which he described being tortured by his Israeli guards, including being forced to sit on a chair with nails protruding into his back for hours at a time.

Despite his imprisonment, Barghouti has remained politically active and is widely viewed as more popular than Palestinian Authority (PA) President and fellow Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.

As part of the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel that went into effect Thursday, Hamas agreed to release 20 living Israeli captives and the bodies of 26 captives who died due to Israel’s bombing and starvation siege on the strip over the past two years. The fate of the two final captives is unknown.

In return, Israel committed to releasing 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and 1,700 Palestinians detained from Gaza. Throughout the war, many Palestinian detainees were tortured and raped in Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman prison, including 53 detainees who died in custody.

Israeli sources speaking to Israeli Army Radio and CNN stated Thursday that the bodies of slain Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar and his brother Mohammad will not be released as part of the exchange deal.

Sinwar was killed by the Israeli military in Gaza in October 2024, while his younger brother, Mohammad, who succeeded him as military leader of Hamas’s armed wing, was killed by Israel earlier this year.

The resistance movement has demanded the release of other high-profile prisoners, including PFLP Secretary-General Ahmad Saadat and chief Qassam Brigades engineer and leader, Abdullah Barghouti. Senior Hamas leader Abbas al-Sayed and Hassan Salameh are also among those the movement wants released.

A Hamas official speaking with Al Jazeera said that negotiations to finalize the list of Palestinian prisoners to be released are ongoing. The source added that Hamas is consulting with other Palestinian resistance movements regarding the list.

Hamas delivered its final response this morning regarding the timelines for implementing the agreement, the source stated.

Regarding the prisoner exchange, Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem told Al Jazeera on Thursday that Israel is trying to “manipulate the dates, lists, and some of the agreed-upon steps.”

“The occupation [Israel] must adhere to what was agreed upon, and we call on the mediators to pressure it,” Qassem added.

Another Hamas official, Mahmoud Mardawi, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is seeking to blow up the ceasefire agreement” by “backtracking on the prisoner lists in an attempt to sabotage the understandings.”

This suggests that Netanyahu is trying to sabotage other aspects of the ceasefire as well, including issues related to the withdrawal, reconstruction, and the reopening of border crossings, Mardawi added.

According to Israeli media, Netanyahu has sabotaged multiple ceasefire agreements since the start of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza two years ago.

Since the start of the war, Israeli forces have killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, about three percent of Gaza’s population, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. Another 169,000 have been wounded amid Israel’s destruction of much of the enclave.

However, in July, The Lancet medical journal published a research correspondence on the difficulty of accounting for the number of those killed by Israel’s war on Gaza, highlighting that both direct and indirect deaths should be considered.

October 9, 2025 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, Zionism