Zionist regime frees Hamas leader in West Bank after 16 months

The illegal Zionist entity has released a senior leader of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas in the occupied West Bank after holding him in prison without trial for 16 months.

According to Press TV, Hassan Yousef, 65, was arrested on April 2 last year after Israeli regime security forces raided his home in Beitunia town, west of Ramallah. Shortly afterward, an Israeli military court ordered his illegal detention for six months.

Administrative detention is a sort of imprisonment without trial or charge that allows the illegal entity to incarcerate Palestinians for up to six months. The detention order can be renewed for indefinite periods of time.

Yousef is a co-founder of the Gaza-based Hamas and once a legislator in the now-defunct Palestinian parliament. His detention was renewed for yet another six-month period before he was given a four-month detention order.

On Thursday, Yousef’s son, Owais, announced that his father “is now at home and is in good health.”

Israeli security forces, he said, freed his father at a military checkpoint in the vicinity of Ramallah instead of letting his relatives and friends receive him outside the Ofer prison as everyone expected.

The senior Hamas official had been imprisoned multiple times before. So far, he has spent some 23 years in different Israeli prisons, the Palestinian Information Center said.

Yousef was released from a previous 10-month prison term in October 2018.

SS