PALESTINE: Palestinian Women Prisoners Return to New Worlds

Women make up only a tiny minority of more than 7,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, but they often pay a high personal price for what has largely been a supporting role in the Palestinian uprising.

Some have raised babies behind bars, and others have watched their families torn apart in their absence.

When 20 of them go home early on Friday — in exchange for the first videotaped sign of life from an Israeli soldier held by Gaza militants — they're returning to worlds very different from what they left behind.

The violent revolt they were swept up in has largely fizzled. Nine years after the outbreak of an uprising against Israeli occupation, Palestinian pragmatists seeking a peace deal have pacified the West Bank. Even Gaza's Islamic militant Hamas rulers have been holding their fire, cowed by Israel's bruising offensive last winter.

Personal circumstances have also changed.

Fatima Ziq, 41, was pregnant when she was arrested in May 2007 as an alleged accomplice in a foiled suicide bombing. She returns to Gaza City with a toddler — her ninth child — who has known only prison life.

Zhour Hamdan, 45, was a married mother of eight when she was picked up in 2003, also as an accomplice in an aborted bombing. Her husband has remarried, and her children were forced to fend for themselves.

"Our mother was the heart of our family," said one of her daughters, Neveen, 22. "When she was arrested, our entire life changed."

The video-for-prisoners exchange is seen as a down payment for a broader swap, in which Israeli Cpl. Gilad Schalit would be traded for about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. The soldier was seized by Hamas-allied militants from an army base near Gaza in June 2006.

As of late summer, Israel held 7,430 Palestinian prisoners on security-related charges, from involvement in deadly attacks to throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, according to government figures provided to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.

Fifty-three of the prisoners are women, according to Palestinian activists, including the 20 slated for early release Friday.

Among those remaining behind bars are five serving life terms, including an accomplice in a 2001 suicide bombing that killed 15 Israelis in a Jerusalem pizza parlor and a woman who used an Internet promise of romance to lure an Israeli teen into a deadly West Bank ambush.

The release of prisoners is an emotional issue for both sides.

Palestinians view the prisoners as heroes fighting Israeli occupation at great personal cost, and virtually every Palestinian family has current or former detainees in its midst.

In contrast, many Israelis see the inmates as terrorists. Since the outbreak of the uprising, 1,171 Israelis have been killed, most in bombings, shootings and other attacks by Palestinian militants. In the same period, more than 6,300 Palestinians were killed by Israelis.

The Israeli public is divided over whether to release large numbers of prisoners in exchange for Israeli captives. Some argue that such releases only drive up the cost of future exchanges and increase the dangers of future attacks.

Israeli military correspondent Alex Fishman said Israel is paying an "exorbitant price" by releasing the women. "We have become accustomed to being pushovers," he wrote Thursday in the Yediot Ahronot daily.

Among Palestinians, there's a broad consensus that women should be first in line for release.

"We are a conservative Muslim society," said Issa Karake, the prisoners affairs minister in the West Bank government. "Women are the pillar of the house. When a wife or mother leaves the house, it would be ruined."

Bothaina Duqmaq, a prisoners' rights activist in the West Bank, said that four babies have been born to Palestinian women in Israeli prisons over the years.

The women slated for release Friday were jailed for relatively minor offenses, were close to release or did not harm Israelis. One woman had a month left on an 11-month sentence for interfering with police activity, according to the Israeli Prisons Service.

Only a few of the women were members of militant groups, and most were assigned supporting roles, such as helping bombers reach their targets, Duqmaq said.

Many were driven by the desire to avenge relatives killed or arrested by Israeli troops.

Linan Abu Gholmeh, 30, from the West Bank city of Nablus, who is getting out after serving four years on a five-year sentence, attempted to stab an Israeli soldier after her husband was killed in a clash with Israeli forces. Heba Natche, 19, tried to stab a soldier in an act of revenge and completed her high school diploma in prison, while serving half of her 40-month sentence.

Hamdan, the mother of eight, told her children she never expected to be arrested when she led a suicide bomber into Israel. The assailant was caught and gave her name to the Israelis. Hamdan told her children that in 2003, at the height of Israeli-Palestinian violence, she was swept up by the angry mood and felt she needed to do her part.

Her youngest, Mohammed, was 18 months old at the time and was raised by his siblings, some of whom quit school to feed the family.

The siblings said their mother's arrest wreaked havoc with their lives and they're eager for her to come home. "These are tears of happiness," Neveen said.