Why Arabs don’t want to receive Palestinian ex-prisoners

 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.