Palestinians in Gaza and Israelis rejoice over the agreement between Israel and Hamas to stop the fighting and release the hostages

Israel says that Marwan Barghouti will not be part of the prisoner release process

Israel does not intend to release prominent Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti as part of an agreement reached with Hamas to release Israeli hostages held in Gaza in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners, Reuters reported.

“I can tell you at this time that he will not be part of this release,” spokesman Shosh Bedrosyan told reporters.

The question of whether Israel would agree to release Barghouti was one of the big questions surrounding the peace agreement.

After more than two decades in Israeli prisons, he remains the most popular leader among Palestinians, consistently topping opinion polls, ahead of former Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

“Barghouti has credibility with Palestinian factions, even while he is in prison,” Janice Stein of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto told CBC. “He was able to communicate, and many saw him as a post-Abbas figure who could unite the Palestinians.”

For the Palestinians, he is a political prisoner, as CBC’s Margaret Evans explained in an article Profile last year. To the Israelis, he is an accused terrorist of leading an armed branch of the Fatah movement known as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and was convicted of ordering killings and carrying out suicide bombings during the Second Intifada.

Stein said that he was on every list of Hamas prisoners that the movement wanted to release in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages.