Neither welcome ceremony, nor cakes, no flags, nor family revelry … Israel’s authorities prohibited last weekend to celebrate any type of festive act during the return to Rose Khwais’s house. At 17, he is the youngest of the Palestinian prisoners released in exchange for Israeli hostages as part of the high -fire agreement in Gaza, where the dead already exceed 47,000. The young woman is, in turn and according to her relatives, the one who supported the greatest condemnation among the released, 10 years. The rumors before a possible exit from the prison had extended weeks in prison, he points out this Thursday at the family residence of Jerusalem. “We didn’t know if there was agreement, but one day they prepared us as if there were. They took pictures, they took the footprints. We weren’t safe, but we sensed that there was, ”he explains.
The second of the exchanges planned in the truce is scheduled for this Saturday, when the known as the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) will deliver to the International Red Cross Committee, in a process like last Sunday, four kidnapped women. Israel plans to free about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 33 hostages in the six weeks that the first of the three phases of the Fire will occupy.
Khwais was arrested in May last year, accused of trying to stabine an Israeli agent in the old city of East Jerusalem, under Israeli occupation. His father, Yousef, 59, shows on the mobile screen the recorded images that day by one of the thousands of cameras who closely monitor the life of the Palestinians. Several policemen are seen by reducing Khwais to gunpoint and rifles next to one of the entrances to the mosque esplanade, the most sacred place for Muslims in the Holy Land. The Khwais family ensures that they did not find any white weapon in their possession and that no one was injured.
To prevent some reception ceremony from being prepared, the relatives explain, several agents had previously watched and registered the house, located in a alley in the area of the Mount of the Olives of Jerusalem. Once Khwais was released in the early hours of last Monday in the known as police station in the Russian neighborhood, in West Jerusalem, she was transferred in the company of her parent to the house in a police vehicle. Yousef says that they had made him sign a commitment that they would not celebrate the return of their daughter, which they have not been able to visit in the more than eight and a half months that she has remained detained.
After being arrested, she was first transferred to the Russian neighborhood police station. There he remained 37 days isolated in the midst of interrogations, insults, blows and nights in which they did not let him sleep, says Khwais sitting on a sofa of the room. For five days, he adds, she was admitted to a hospital, suffering from heart problems. Then he was passing in the Hasharon prison, north of Tel Aviv. From there, to Damun’s Women’s Prison, near Haifa, where he has remained until his release. “That was the happiest moment of my life because they no longer hit me. The police station was hell, ”he describes to compare it with the weeks of harassment described in the Jerusalem facilities.
Khwais speaks quietly, with short phrases splashed by the occasional smile. He does not hide that he feels a certain fear for the possibility that his words will take her back to jail, a period from which he prefers to turn the page. “I kept quiet and silent because I didn’t want to have problems. I just wanted to spend that day as quickly as possible and, the next day, we would see. I was afraid of them, ”he says.
On the night from Sunday to Monday, 90 Palestinian inmates, mostly women and children, including Rose Khwais, left Israeli penalties hours after Hamas released three Israeli women who remained captive in the strip from October 7, 2023 .
The terms of the current truce carried on the negotiating table since May last year, but the agreement has not been reached until the new president of the United States, Donald Trump, did not press to be accepted by the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. In fact, Khwais and some of his companions had been transferred to Section 3 of Damun two months before being released amid rumors that his departure was being agreed. There it coincided with some Gaza women who stayed in the cells when they were taken. The nerves, explains the young woman, were in the flower in recent days while closing the fringes of the pact. They were not transferred by bus to Jerusalem until the same Sunday afternoon, once the fire had already begun.
“Your daughter is going to be released with the agreement,” explains Yousef that he heard through a phone call in which the Israeli authorities asked him to go to the police station. There he stamped his signature in a document in which he promised not to carry out celebrations. The sobriety of his daughter Rose’s house contrasts with the enfrédida crowd that, among flags mostly from Hamas and fireworks, received the bulk of the 90s released around the prison of Offer, on the outskirts of Ramala, administrative capital of the West Bank. Rose Khwais’s grandmother’s satisfaction, lying on an armchair of the room adjacent to the living room, shows the happiness with which the family has welcomed the young woman.
