Israel prepares 26 Palestinians for release

Twenty-six Palestinian convicts were in a single jail before their release by Israel starting late Tuesday, hours before Middle East peace talks were to resume. The prisoners were moved into the maximum-security Ayalon Prison in the central Israeli city of Ramla, an Israeli Prison Service official told Ynetnews. The inmates were then expected to be divided into two groups and taken to two other prisons, probably in southern Israel, the official said. One group of 12 will then be taken to the Beitunia Crossing where they will be released into the West Bank, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said in a statement. The remaining 14 prisoners will be taken to the Erez Crossing on the Israeli-Gaza Strip barrier, where they will be released into the Gaza Strip, Netanyahu said. An exact release schedule was not decided, but the prisoners would be released starting Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, the prison official told Ynetnews. Before being released, the prisoners will have their identities confirmed, undergo a medical exam and have a final talk with the prison's commander and staff, Ynetnews said. It was not immediately clear if the prisoners will be required to sign a pledge vowing not to pursue attacks against Israel, as earlier-released prisoners were required to do. "It's not the first time we've release security detainees," a prison source told Ynetnews. "We've released hundreds before and we're experienced." Israel announced the prisoners' names late Sunday. Among them is one of the convicted killers of a Holocaust survivor named Isaac Rotenberg, 67, who was found bludgeoned to death in 1994. Another prisoner was convicted of killing 84-year-old Israeli Avraham Kinstler with an ax. Several Palestinian Authority officials said they were disappointed Israel did not include at least two or three prisoners well known to the Palestinian public. Nonetheless, emotional family reunions are expected to take place across the West Bank and Gaza, where the freed men will be celebrated as heroes, British newspaper The Guardian reported. While Israelis view the men as terrorists, Palestinians see them as prisoners of war. Their release is also likely to result, at least for a while, in a more favorable atmosphere among Palestinians toward the peace talks, the newspaper said. That is a key reason Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas insisted on the move before returning to the negotiating table, the newspaper said. The talks, a result of intense shuttle diplomacy by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, are to resume in Jerusalem Wednesday. U.S. special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations Martin Indyk and Frank Lowenstein, his deputy, will "help facilitate" the negotiations, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters last week. After the Jerusalem talks, the negotiators plan to hold another session in Jericho on the West Bank, Psaki said without giving a date for that meeting. The two sides resumed the long-stalled talks in Washington two weeks ago after Kerry made resurrecting the talks a key priority. The prisoner release and resumption of peace talks come shortly after Israel's Saturday authorization of 1,200 new homes to be built in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The settlement announcements were part of a political balancing act to satisfy many Israelis, The New York Times and Israeli newspaper Maariv said. Kerry said Monday the announcements "were to some degree expected because we have known that there was going to be a continuation of some building in certain places." But he said one announcement might have been "outside of that level of expectation" and he would talk with Netanyahu about it by Tuesday. "I'm sure that we will work out a path forward," Kerry told reporters on a visit to U.S. ally Colombia.