A year after the deal to release IDF soldier Gilad Schalit, 18 of the Palestinian security prisoners involved in the swap are being allowed to return to the West Bank, the Shin Bet confirmed on Monday.The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) said that the men had been deported to the Gaza Strip and “elsewhere abroad” after the release of Schalit last October, and if the deal goes through they will be in the West Bank in the coming days. The Shin Bet added that the agreement to return them to the West Bank after a year was part of the original prisoner-exchange deal brokered with Egypt, in which Israel released 1,027 prisoners.The Shin Bet would not reveal any details about the identities of the prisoners or if they were held in Israeli jails for minor security crimes or were linked to deadly terrorist attacks in Israel.A number of the security prisoners released in the Schalit deal were deported outside the Palestinian territories, including Amna Muna, the woman who was serving a life sentence for luring 16- year-old Ofir Rahum to Ramallah where he was murdered in 2001, and Ahlam Tamimi, one of the architects of the 2001 Sbarro pizza bombing in Jerusalem that killed 15 Israeli civilians.Muna refused to be sent to the Gaza Strip and instead cnxps.cmd.push(function () { cnxps({ playerId: '36af7c51-0caf-4741-9824-2c941fc6c17b' }).render('4c4d856e0e6f4e3d808bbc1715e132f6'); });
