Who are the Palestinian prisoners being freed in return for the hostages?

Also set to be released is Mahmud Abu Warda, who is serving 48 life sentences for planning and executing multiple terror attacks, including the 1996 murder of 45 Israelis in two bus bombings in Jerusalem.

Wissam Abbasi, Mohammad Odeh, and Wael Qassim of the so-called Silwan Squadron, jailed in 2002 in connection to a string of bombings that killed over 30 Israelis in crowded civilian areas of Jerusalem during the Second Intifada, are also listed for release. The three men were given life sentences for murder and a series of other crimes, according to Israel’s justice ministry.

Israeli media has also reported that Khalida Jarrar, a leader in the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, will be released as part of the exchange. Jarrar, 62, was elected to the PLC in 2006 and has continued to serve as an elected representative since but has spent much of the last decade in and out of Israeli prison, despite having not been convicted of direct involvement in the Popular Front’s military activities. In recent years she has been held mainly without formal charges.

Khalida Jarrar, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), is set to be released as part of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas beginning 19 January, 2025. (AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images

While Israel is refusing to release Marwan Barghouti, a former commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades who was detained during the 2002 Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank, they have agreed to release his aide, Ahmed Barghouti, who was also detained during Operation Defensive Shield, serving at the time as a senior military official in Fatah.

The latter Barghouti was sentenced to 13 life sentences in Israel for involvement in terror attacks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that killed six people, including a police officer.

According to the Palestinian Commission of Detainees' Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners' Society, there are currently 10,400 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, though that figure has not been updated to include people arrested in Gaza during the last 15 months.

As of Saturday morning, the Justice Ministry published the names of 737 male, female and teen-aged prisoners, some of whom are members of militant groups convicted of attacks that killed dozens of Israelis, to allow petitions against their release to be submitted to the High Court.

The other 1,167 are Palestinians detained in the Gaza Strip since the start of the IDF’s ground offensive and who did not participate in Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israeli communities.