Category World News

“Cigars and champagne, who cares about that?” US President Donald Trump urged Israeli President Isaac Herzog to pardon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial in three corruption cases. In one case, Netanyahu’s accused of accepting gifts including cigars, jewellery and champagne from businessmen.

Thousands of Palestinians gathered in Ramallah on Monday to await the release of some 2,000 political prisoners and forcibly disappeared people who were taken by Israel from the West Bank, which it occupies, and Gaza, which it has waged war on for two years.

Palestinians welcomed back 96 political prisoners, as well as the vast majority of people Israel detained from Gaza during the war.

This comes as part of an exchange of 20 living and 28 deceased Israeli captives held in Gaza for the nearly 2,000 Palestinian captives.

Of the more than 200 Israeli captives taken by Hamas on October 7, 2023, a total of 114 were released during two captive swaps with Hamas in November 2023 and January 2025, respectively.

They were handed over in exchange for the freedom of a total of 1,240 Palestinians.

Despite the brief euphoria, Israel violated ceasefires that coincided with those captive releases, arresting Palestinians across Gaza and the occupied territory wholesale, usually without charge.

Here’s all you need to know about the Palestinians expected to be released as part of the ceasefire deal, as well as those who were not included in the deal and who will stay in captivity.

Who is being released?

A total of 250 Palestinian political prisoners who are either serving life sentences or long sentences are being released from Israeli jails.

According to data obtained by Al Jazeera, all but nine of these prisoners are from the West Bank, and 157 of them are members of Fatah, the party that controls the Palestinian Authority governing parts of the West Bank.

Sixty-five are from Hamas, and the rest are from smaller political factions.

In addition, Israel will free 1,718 Palestinians who were, according to the United Nations, forcefully disappeared by Israel over the last two years of its genocidal war on Gaza.

Five of them are children under the age of 18, and two are women, according to the prisoner list obtained by Al Jazeera.

Most of the disappeared from Gaza were held in military camps, where dehumanisation and torture were rampant, according to international and Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups.

Palestinians were reportedly subjected to severe beatings, medical neglect, starvation and even rape.

According to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, 77 prisoners have died in Israeli custody since October 7.

How many Palestinians is Israel not releasing?

Thousands.

According to Addameer, a Palestinian human rights organisation tracking political prisoners, the number of people taken captive by Israel increased from 5,200 to 11,100 since October 7, 2023.

The vast majority of these prisoners are from the occupied West Bank – 400 of them children.

Murad Jadallah, a human rights researcher with Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, told Al Jazeera: “Israel tries to destroy Palestinian society in different ways, and arresting children is one of the tools it uses to do so.”

Once a Palestinian captive is released, that’s it, right?

No.

Israel tends to re-arrest Palestinians shortly after they are freed in captive swaps, said Tahani Mustafa, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

In November 2023, Israel released 240 Palestinian prisoners in a swap for Israeli captives held by Hamas in Gaza as part of a temporary ceasefire deal.

Weeks later, Israel re-arrested 30 of those people.

“Israel has a long history of using incarceration and arrests as a political weapon, and sometimes that could be for bargaining purposes for a later date,” Mustafa told Al Jazeera.

“There’s also no guarantee [with this current deal] that those being released won’t be rearrested again,” she added.

Will all of these Palestinian detainees be able to go home today?

Most of them have already been released.

While 96 of the 250 high-level political prisoners are being released to the West Bank and Gaza, about 154 of them are being deported from Palestine to third countries that have not been announced yet.

According to WAFA, the 154 have been taken to Egypt, but that will not be the final destination for all of them.

Israel may decide not to release everyone until it also retrieves the bodies of 28 deceased Israeli captives, which are expected over the next 72 hours.

Hamas said that it may struggle to locate all the deceased captives in that timeframe, but that the group is actively searching for them.

Thousands of people gathered in Khan Younis, Gaza, to welcome Palestinians – mostly civilians, including medics – who were disappeared by Israel.

There must be thousands of happy families today?

Well, yes, but they’ve been threatened not to show it.

Families are ordered by Israel not to celebrate the release of their loved ones or raise Palestinian flags in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

And the families of prisoners who are being exiled today will likely be prevented from travelling abroad to meet them in their country of exile.

Jadallah, from Al-Haq, added that most Palestinians merely hope the captive swap represents a permanent end to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

He added that Palestinians are unhappy that prominent Palestinian leaders such as Marwan Barghouti and Ahmed Saadat will not be released.

The former is arguably the most famous Palestinian political prisoner, traditionally aligned with Fatah, and the latter leads the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Renowned Palestinian doctor Hussam Abu Safia, who was abducted from Kamel Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza in December 2024, was not among the list of prisoners expected to be released.

Abu Safia has been subjected to severe torture and solitary confinement, according to human rights monitors.

While Israelis celebrated the return of captives from Gaza, Israel warned Palestinian families against holding celebrations over the return of prisoners – some who had been held for decades. Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh explains.

United States President Donald Trump had the time of his life on Monday at the Israeli Knesset, where he was welcomed as “the president of peace”. His captive audience showered him with applause, laughs and too many standing ovations to count. A single protester undertook a brief outburst but was swiftly bundled out, earning the president more laughs and applause for his remark: “That was very efficient.”

It was a typical stream-of-consciousness Trump speech although he mercifully refrained from rambling about escalators and teleprompters this time.

I had initially hoped the fact that the US head of state was promptly due at a Gaza summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, might have kept the tangents to a minimum. Such hopes were dashed, but Trump did manage to devote a good bit of time to speculating about whether his summit counterparts might have already departed Egypt by the time he arrived.

Trump’s Knesset appearance was occasioned by the ostensible end – for the moment – to the US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has over the past two years officially killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. Some scholars have suggested that the real death toll may be in the vicinity of 680,000.

Obviously, the Palestinian genocide victims were of scant concern at the Knesset spectacle, which was essentially an exercise of mutual flattery between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a celebration of Israel’s excellence in mass slaughter. To that end, Trump informed Israel that “you’ve won” and congratulated Netanyahu on a “great job”.

As if that weren’t an obscene enough tribute to genocide, enforced starvation and terror in Gaza, Trump boasted that “we make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve given a lot to Israel, … and you used them well.”

There were also various references to what he has previously called on social media the “3,000 YEAR CATASTROPHE”, which he fancies himself as having now resolved. This on top of the “seven wars” he claims to have ended in seven months, another figure that seems to have materialised out of thin air.

But, hey, when you’re a “great president”, you don’t have to explain yourself.

In addition to self-adulation, Trump had plenty of praise for other members of his entourage, including US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff – who merited a lengthy digression on the subject of Russian President Vladimir Putin – and Trump’s “genius” son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was also in attendance despite having no official role in the current administration.

During Trump’s first term as president, Kushner served as a senior White House adviser and a key player in the Abraham Accords, the normalisation deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, which essentially sidelined the Palestinian issue in the Arab political arena.

Trump’s Knesset performance included numerous sales pitches for the Abraham Accords, which he noted he preferred to pronounce “Avraham” because it was “so much sort of nicer”. Emphasising how good the normalisation deals have been for business, Trump declared that the four existing signatories have already “made a lot of money being members”.

To be sure, any expansion of the Abraham Accords in the present context would function to legitimise genocide and accelerate Palestinian dispossession. As it stands, the surviving inhabitants of Gaza have been condemned to a colonial overlordship, euphemised as a “Board of Peace” – which Trump has hailed as a “beautiful name” and which will be presided over by the US president himself.

This, apparently, is what the Palestinians need to “turn from the path of terror and violence”, as Trump put it – and never mind that the Palestinians aren’t the ones who have been waging a genocide for the past two years.

Preceding Trump at the podium was Netanyahu, adding another level of psychological torture for anyone who was forced to watch the two leaders back to back. Thanking the US president for his “pivotal leadership” in supposedly ending a war that, mind you, Netanyahu didn’t even want to end, the Israeli prime minister pronounced him the “greatest friend that the State of Israel has ever had in the White House”.

Netanyahu furthermore put up Trump as the first non-Israeli nominee for the Israel Prize and assured him he’d get his Nobel, too, soon enough.

I didn’t time Trump’s own speech although I’d calculate that it was several aneurysms long. At one point in the middle of his discussion of some topic entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, I wondered if my anguished cries at having to listen to him speak might elicit the concern of my neighbours.

When Trump at long last decided to wrap things up, his final lines included the proclamation: “I love Israel. I’m with you all the way.”

And while US affection for a genocidal state should come as no surprise to anyone, it’s also a good indication that “peace” is not really what’s happening at all.

Israeli air strikes on Gaza may have halted, and a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas is ongoing, but tucked behind the headlines, tensions are brewing in Gaza between Hamas and armed groups.

On Sunday, clashes erupted between an armed clan and Hamas security forces, killing at least 27 people, including eight members of Hamas, according to the Ministry of Interior in Gaza.

Caught in the crossfire was 28-year-old Palestinian journalist Saleh Aljafarawi, who was covering clashes in Gaza City’s Sabra neighbourhood between what security sources told Al Jazeera Arabic was an “armed militia” and Hamas.

Is that the only militia in Gaza? Who are these armed gangs? What are their goals? And are they really affiliated with Israel?

Here’s all you need to know:

Who fought Hamas on Sunday?

Media reports and sources said the clan that was fighting Hamas in Gaza City is the Doghmush clan.

The large family has members in various factions across the political spectrum in Gaza.

Momtaz Doghmush was involved in the group Jaish al-Islam’s capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2008. Other clan members have been in Hamas or groups affiliated with the Palestinian Authority.

Some reports claimed the Doghmush who fought Hamas on Sunday were affiliated with Israel, but other sources from Gaza deny the affiliation with Israel.

What happened?

The Sahem unit, an armed unit affiliated with the Interior Ministry, said the clashes started on Saturday when “an outlaw gang killed resistance fighters from the Qassam Brigades”, the armed wing of Hamas, near the Jordan Field Hospital in Gaza City.

Witnesses told the BBC that 300 Hamas fighters stormed a residential block where Doghmush gunmen were holed up, and a Palestinian security source told the Reuters news agency that Hamas launched a campaign in Gaza City that killed 32 members of “a gang”.

According to the Interior Ministry, eight Hamas members and 19 clan members were killed. Aljafarawi was also killed.

There was an outpouring of grief over Aljafarawi’s killing in the midst of which a video of him greeting his friend and colleague Anas al-Sharif circulated on social media.

Al-Sharif, an Al Jazeera correspondent, was killed by Israel on August 10. Aljafarawi, like al-Sharif, was reportedly threatened multiple times by the Israelis over his reporting.

Are the Doghmush really backed by Israel?

That’s still unclear.

There is conflicting information. Some reports from inside Gaza said the clan has an Israeli affiliation, but the group’s leaders have denied that.

In early October, Nizar Doghmush, head of the clan in Gaza City, told the Los Angeles Times he had been contacted by the Israeli military to manage a so-called humanitarian zone in Gaza City.

He told the newspaper he refused and added that the Israeli military then bombed his neighbourhood in Gaza City, invaded and systematically destroyed houses.

The Doghmush and Hamas have an animosity towards each other, which in the past has devolved into armed clashes.

But Israel does have a history of funding and supporting groups in an effort to foment internal tensions.

Israel does support militias in Gaza, right?

Yes.

Israel is widely recognised to be behind the Popular Forces, a militia led by Yasser Abu Shabab of Gaza’s Tarabin Bedouin tribe.

The Tarabin, however, have denounced Abu Shabab.

While Israel claimed Hamas was stealing aid from the people of Gaza, it was revealed that the Popular Forces was the one looting aid to resell to Gaza’s starving people. Hamas reportedly clashed with the Popular Forces on a few occasions since September 2024, accusing them of being Israeli collaborators.

Israel has also reportedly backed a group calling itself the Strike Force Against Terror, led by Hussam al-Astal, a member of the al-Majida clan. Al-Astal’s group also clashed with Hamas in early October before the ceasefire was announced, according to Israeli media.

Al-Astal is a former officer in the Palestinian Authority’s (PA’s) security forces but was accused by the PA and Hamas of collaborating with Israel in the 1990s. Israeli media reports said al-Astal was a member of Abu Shabab’s militia and continues to coordinate with the Popular Forces leader.

He reportedly controls a village called Qizan an-Najjar in the Khan Younis governorate in southern Gaza.

The ongoing activity of these groups against Hamas and against civilians has contributed to a sense of unrest, as several people in Gaza have told Al Jazeera.

What happens now?

The fighting has stopped, but further clashes could still erupt in a society devastated by two years of Israel’s genocidal war.

The security void could lead to confrontations between groups looking to gain influence or territory.

For its part, Hamas has denied deploying fighters to the streets.

Meanwhile, Palestinians are returning to what is left of their homes in northern Gaza, and desperately needed humanitarian aid has started to enter the Gaza Strip.