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QATANNA: A stone’s throw from the wall separating Israel and the occupied West Bank, the Shamasneh family is ready to welcome home two sons jailed for the past 34 years.
Abdel Jawad and Mohammed are expected to be among the Palestinians freed from Israeli detention under the terms of the ceasefire agreement approved last week.
“Today I’m so happy the world feels too small for my joy,” declared their elated mother, 83-year-old Halima Shamasneh.
“People called us and said: ‘Their names are on the list — they’re out, they’re registered’,” she said.
Israel has drawn up a list of 250 names of Palestinian prisoners expected to be released on Monday in exchange for the remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza.
Halima and her husband Yusef gathered their children and grandchildren in the family home in the West Bank village of Qatanna just north of Jerusalem, to celebrate the news.
On the house’s walls, the many photos of the brothers before their arrest have faded in color.
Their clothes reflect the 1980s, the decade in which the two men were arrested. Abdel Jawad is now 62 and Mohammed in his late 50s.
For the celebration, Halima wore her tabriz dress with a traditional Palestinian embroidery.
Yusef wore a suit, his head adorned with a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf secured with an agal ring.

Pushback in Israel

In the living room, two large posters printed in the 1990s by the Palestinian Authority-linked “Prisoners Club,” show the two brothers and urge their release.
“I was nine when my father was imprisoned — now I’m 44, with four children of my own. To be deprived of your father is a tragedy,” Ajwad Shamasneh, Abdel Jawad’s son, told AFP as his son played nearby.
Like all of Abdel Jawad’s 17 grandchildren, he has never seen his grandfather.
“To hug your father after 34 years... it’s indescribable,” he said, while his brothers around him fought back tears.
Ajwad, who works as a day laborer in Israel, said he had not been able to see his father for the past eight years after prison authorities stopped allowing visits.
No one at the celebration evoked the reasons for Abdel Jawad and Mohammed’s imprisonment.
Abdel Jawad’s file shared by Israel in the list of prisoners to be released reads that he was committed to a life sentence for murder, attempted murder and conspiracy.
Prisoner release deals between Palestinians and Israelis are often decried by families of murder victims who challenge the deals in the country’s supreme court.
The court rejected such a petition on Friday, ruling that “matters of war and peace, including the government’s agreements with the enemy regarding a ceasefire and its conditions, are not judicial.”

‘Real hope’

In January 2025, a six-week truce saw hundreds of Palestinians released in exchange for hostages, but not the Shamasneh brothers.
“I had hope, but it didn’t come true back then. Today, though, it’s real hope,” said Yusef of his sons.
“People have been calling me non-stop,” Yusef said with emotion, before being called by relatives congratulating him.
There is one cloud of doubt over the celebration. If his sons are freed, they could be exiled abroad, as sometimes happens to high-profile prisoners.
“I hope they come here. I really hope so. If they go abroad, I won’t be able to see them — neither I nor their mother,” Yusef said.
Israel and Hamas have agreed on the first phase of a Gaza ceasefire and hostage-prisoner exchange deal, based on a 20-point plan proposed by US President Donald Trump.
According to the plan, Israel will release 250 prisoners and around 1,700 Gazans detained since the war began following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Asked what she’ll cook her sons upon their return home, Halima answers without hesitation that it will be a typical lamb and yoghurt Palestinian dish.
“Mansaf! We’ll slaughter a sheep and cook a feast — for them and for the people who will visit,” she said.
“Tonight, we won’t sleep — we’ll stay up celebrating, welcoming everyone who comes, one after another,” she added, before breaking off into song.