By Khaled Abu Toameh, the full report at https://tinyurl.com/3t5u3a7a
Most of the Arab
countries are refusing to receive Palestinians released from Israeli prison as
part of the US-brokered Israel-Hamas ceasefire-hostage deal.
In the past few
weeks, Israel released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners — many of whom were
imprisoned for acts of terrorism — in return for Israeli hostages who kidnapped
to the Gaza Strip during the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, invasion of southern
Israel.
Many were released
to Egypt, with the hope that other Arab countries would host them.
According to
Palestinian sources, the Egyptians have agreed to allow only a handful of
ex-prisoners to remain in Egypt, while dozens of others are searching for
countries that will agree to receive them.
With the exception
of Qatar and Turkey (a non-Arab Muslim country), most of the Arab countries
have reportedly refused to allow the released prisoners into their borders, the
sources revealed.
The ex-prisoners,
many of whom belong to the Iran-backed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad
terrorist groups, are stuck in Cairo, where they are staying in hotels and
hospitals.
It seems the Arab
states are not eager to provide shelter to Islamist jihadists who could join
forces with other terror groups and pose a threat to the regimes that have
taken them in.
The Jordanians and
Lebanese, for their part, have not forgotten how Palestinians sparked civil
wars in their countries in the 70s and 80s.
After the
Palestinians tried to overthrow their host, King Hussein of Jordan, in 1970;
then started a civil war in Lebanon right after that; then, when welcomed into
Kuwait, took the side of Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait
in 1990, it is hard to blame any regime.
Tunisia and Jordan
refuse to receive any of the released deported prisoners stuck in Egypt, and
Algeria has not responded yet, while Turkey, Malaysia and Pakistan will each
receive 45 prisoners.
Algeria gave initial
approval to receive a number of prisoners from a specific faction [belonging to
the ruling Fatah faction headed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas], while Tunisia refused to receive any of the released prisoners.
“The prisoners who
were released and deported from Palestine and now stuck in hotels in Cairo.
They are still wearing their prison clothes and have not changed them.
There is no Arab
country willing to accept them, not even those countries that were crying over
the Gaza Strip, the Gazans and Palestine [during the Israel-Hamas war], and
even keyboard heroes are unable to pressure their governments to accept the
prisoners.
Most of the Arab
states did almost nothing to help the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the
war, which was triggered by the October 7 massacre of Israelis.
Their refusal came
about partly because those countries despise Hamas and, unsurprisingly,
consider it a threat to their national security.
The refusal to take
in Palestinian prisoners probably arises from the fact that these countries
actually do not care about the Palestinians and even consider them an
ungrateful people and troublemakers.
Many Arabs also seem
to have lost faith in the Palestinians’ ability to implement reform and end
rampant financial and administrative corruption in their governing bodies in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In the past few
decades, many Arab states, despite repeated pledges of hundreds of millions of
dollars, have significantly reduced financial aid to the Palestinians.
According to the
Palestinian Authority (PA) Finance Ministry, the PA’s funding from Arab
countries dropped from $265.5 million in 2019 to $40 million in 2020.
The biggest cut was
from Saudi Arabia, which reduced its $174.7 million aid to the PA in 2019 to
only $32 million in 2020 — a decrease of 81.4%.
Many of these Arabs
understand that Hamas and many other Palestinians have no intention of
abandoning the fight against Israel, a move that will result in more violence,
bloodshed and destruction.
That is also
probably why no Arab country is going to invest one dollar in the Gaza Strip as
long as Hamas remains in power and as long as Palestinian children are
indoctrinated to murder Jews.
