Six freed Palestinian prisoners were killed on Tuesday, July 8, 2025, in two Israeli airstrikes that targeted tents sheltering displaced civilians in central and southern Gaza, as part of the ongoing genocide perpetrated by Tel Aviv for more than 21 months.
According to a Palestinian medical source, the six victims were mostly former prisoners who had been exiled from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip. The strikes targeted displacement camps in the Al-Mawasi area west of Khan Younis and the town of Al-Zawaida in the central governorate.
A well-informed Palestinian source revealed that five of those killed were released as part of the 2011 “Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal” (Operation Wafa al-Ahrar), under which Israel released 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit by Hamas.
The sixth victim, the source added, was among the exiled Palestinians deported from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem during the 2002 Israeli siege.
On May 10, 2002, 38 Palestinians were deported to Gaza and European countries under a Palestinian-Israeli agreement that ended the 39-day Israeli military siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Hamas Responds
The Hamas movement stated that the Israeli army had assassinated six freed and exiled prisoners in Gaza, as part of a “policy of vengeance and systematic killing targeting those who resisted and endured” inside Israeli prisons.
Hamas official Abdel Hakim Hanini said in a statement that “the Israeli occupation’s targeted killings of freed prisoners — the latest being the assassination of six exiled to Gaza — is further evidence of the deep-seated Zionist hatred.”
He added: “The assassination of former prisoners is part of a calculated policy of revenge and systematic elimination of those who resisted and sacrificed years of their lives in the prisons of oppression.”
Hanini mourned the six martyrs: Naji Ubayyat, Bilal Zaraa, Mahmoud Abu Sariyya, Amjad Abu Arqoub, Riad Asaliyya, and Mahmoud al-Dahbour.
He stressed that this crime “will be added to the long record of massacres and atrocities committed by the Israeli military against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank — crimes that will not be forgotten or forgiven with time.”