Heroes to Palestinians, but killers to Israelis: Either way, they now go free

Summary
The release of Palestinian prisoners as part of the Israel-Hamas cease-fire deal is deeply controversial in Israel and invigorating to the Palestinian public after 15 months of fighting.Zakaria Zubeidi was lifted by a crowd upon his arrival with other released Palestinians in Ramallah, the West Bank, on Thursday.
The last time Zakaria Zubeidi left prison, it was through a hole he dug with five other convicts, in a brief escape attempt before being recaptured. On Thursday, the Palestinian militant walked out the door, the highest-profile prisoner released in the unfolding cease-fire deal in Gaza.
Zubeidi, the former head of a West Bank militia, was among more than 100 Palestinian prisoners freed Thursday in the exchange for hostages who were held in Gaza. Israel says Zubeidi orchestrated attacks that killed Israelis during the Second Intifada uprising in the 2000s.
Crowds mobbed Zubeidi as he got off a bus in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, hoisting him on their shoulders and thrusting a Palestinian flag into his hand.
The release of the prisoners, while deeply controversial in Israel, is invigorating the Palestinian public after a 15-month war in Gaza that shattered the once-vibrant territory and caused the deaths of more than 47,000 people, according to Palestinian health authorities, who don’t say how many were combatants.
In total, more than 1,700 Palestinians are expected to be freed over the 42-day cease-fire in return for 33 hostages held by Hamas and its allies.
Palestinians consider many of the prisoners, who like Zubeidi spent years in Israeli jails, to be freedom fighters for the national cause. Their release is expected to give Hamas a public-relations boost, even as many Palestinians blame the group for launching the attacks on Israel that sparked the war. The Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, left about 1,200 dead, while 250 were taken hostage.
Wearing a kaffiyeh, a symbol of the Palestinian cause, Zubeidi on Thursday cheered those who came out to support the prisoners. “What we are seeing today is a public referendum on the resistance fighters," he said, referring to the gathered crowds, according to videos posted online.
Israelis across the political spectrum, even if they support the deal, have been stung by the price of freeing those held hostage. Israeli officials have described the release of Palestinian prisoners as a painful but necessary act to free the hostages held in Gaza.
Of the 110 Palestinian prisoners released Thursday, around 32 were serving life sentences. A week ago, Israeli authorities released 200 prisoners, including some serving life sentences.
Zubeidi was released with other well-known Palestinian militants who killed Israelis. These included Sami Jaradat, who was serving a life sentence for directing a suicide bomber to attack a restaurant in Haifa in 2003, killing 21 people and wounding 60; and Mohammed Abu Warda, whom Israel convicted of orchestrating bus bombings in Jerusalem in 1996 that killed dozens.
Zubeidi, at right, attended a court session remotely in 2021 after he and other escaped prisoners were recaptured.Zubeidi’s family gathered in Jenin, the West Bank, after his 2021 prison escape and arrest.
Both Jaradat and Abu Warda were exiled from the Palestinian territories as a condition of their release. Zubeidi was sent back to the West Bank.
One of the prisoners expected to be released later in the cease-fire deal, Bilal Abu Ghanem, was convicted in connection with his involvement in a 2015 shooting and stabbing attack on a bus in Jerusalem. The attack killed three people, including Israeli-American Richard Lakin.
Lakin’s son, Micah Avni, said he found out about the release of his father’s killer from a news article. Avni said he felt upset that Israel couldn’t provide justice for his father’s killing. The policy of releasing prisoners for hostages would only encourage more kidnapping and murder, he said.
“I feel I’m in some way helping to save lives," Avni said. “On the other hand, I believe by not doing everything to stop this, I’m an accomplice to future murder. It’s a crazy situation."
Hamas’s now-dead leader, Yahya Sinwar, launched the Oct. 7 attacks of 2023 in part because he wanted to kidnap Israelis to exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Sinwar himself was a prisoner in Israel for more than two decades before he was freed in a 2011 swap.
Zubeidi is an icon of the national cause for Palestinians, but a hardened killer to Israelis. He grew up in a home in the West Bank town of Jenin that for years hosted Israelis and Palestinians who opposed the conflict. During the First Intifada, in the late 1980s, the top floor of Zubeidi’s house was used for a theater group for children organized by Israeli peace activists, and he was a child actor, according to a documentary about the theater group.
He became one of the stars of the documentary, filmed during the Second Intifada, which followed the lives of some of the young boys from the theater group who had turned to militancy as they grew up.
Israeli troops killed Zubeidi’s mother and brother in 2002, deepening his descent into armed opposition. He carried a silver Smith & Wesson; his face was speckled with black burn marks from a grenade explosion.
Israel says Zubeidi orchestrated a shooting and grenade attack in 2002 that killed six people and wounded 40 others, his most notorious violent act.
“Why should I support peace?" a 27-year-old Zubeidi told The Wall Street Journal in a 2003 interview. “My mother did, and look what happened to her."
After the uprising ended, he and an Israeli peacenik in 2006 founded a theater in Jenin, The Freedom Theatre, which still exists. But in 2019, Israel arrested and charged Zubeidi with committing fresh shooting attacks on Israeli buses and indicted him for two murder charges dating back more than a decade, according to Israeli press reports at the time.
Two years later, Zubeidi escaped with five others from Gilboa Prison in northern Israel. They used improvised tools including a pen and a coat hanger to dig a tunnel to the foundations of the building, break through and dig under a wall surrounding the prison.
After the six were recaptured at a hideout in Jenin, the spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, who is known as Abu Obeida, said the prisoners’ jailers would one day “open the cell doors for them."
Israeli police recaptured Zubeidi in northern Israel, days after his jailbreak and the manhunt that followed.
According to Arab mediators involved in the Israel-Hamas negotiations, Hamas insisted that the six prisoners from the jailbreak be freed in the current cease-fire deal. Three were released this week.
The release of prisoners could improve Hamas’s popularity despite the death and destruction caused by the war, said Ghassan Khatib, a lecturer at Birzeit University in the West Bank. Most Palestinian families have at least one relative who has spent time in prison, and the issue is close to the hearts of ordinary people, he said.
“The fact that Hamas, in spite of everything else, managed to achieve the release of a relatively big number of prisoners, this is a big plus for Hamas," he said.
Some of those released questioned whether the human toll in Gaza was worth freeing them from prison.
“If I had known that the price of my freedom would be the blood of Gaza’s children, I would have refused to leave prison," Mohammed al-Tous, released last weekend after 39 years in prison, told Arab broadcaster Al Mashhad.
—Dov Lieber contributed to this article.
Write to Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com and Rory Jones at Rory.Jones@wsj.com