Mohammed al-Tous, the Palestinian who was in an Israeli cell for 40 years, is one of the two hundred Palestinian prisoners that Israel released today, in exchange for the four female Israeli soldiers who let Hamas go early this morning.
Israel has transferred two hundred Palestinian prisoners to the Red Cross. They are released in exchange for the four female Israeli soldiers who were released earlier in the day by the extremist Palestinian organization Hamas. Around 130 prisoners were brought to Ramallah, on the West Bank. The other seventies were switched off “due to serious crimes”, towards Egypt.
One of those seventy is Mohammed al-Tous, 69 years old. The man has been in an Israeli cell since 1985 and was, according to the Palestinian prisoners’ association, the longest Palestinian in Israeli imprisonment.
Fighter of Arafat
Al-Tous was born in Bethlehem, on the West Bank occupied by Israel. He soon joined Fatah, the resistance movement founded by the late Yasser Arafat. He led a Palestinian command unit that committed attacks on Israeli territory. In a bloody counter -action of the Israeli army, a stone’s throw from the Jordanian border, he was the only survivor of the command seriously injured.
In October of the same year, a military court sentenced him to a life sentence. Since then he was continuously in prison. The majority of the time was in that of Ktziot, in the Israeli Negev desert, about 7o kilometers southwest of Beersheba. Three years ago his name was already on the list for a prison exchange, but then a kink came in the cable at the last minute.
Al-Tous and his companions will now first be examined and cared for in an Egyptian hospital, before “choosing Algeria, Turkey or Tunisia,” Amin Choumane, head of the Palestinian High Committee for the Palestinian prisoners, told the French news agency AFP.