It is not clear whether it was by design or by accident that there is a one-month period between the scheduled date of the fourth Palestinian prisoner release by Israel and the end of the nine-month Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Regardless, Palestinians recognized that the month of April provided them with a unique opportunity to be unshackled from the commitments they made not to join UN agencies before the end of the peace talk timetable.
As Al-Monitor reported as a possibility, Palestinians on April 1 carried out their threat to join UN agencies if Israel failed to release the final 26 prisoners from the 104 that it had agreed to free in return for the Palestinian's withholding their applications. This is the second time that Israel has reneged on the release of these long-term prisoners, whose incarceration predates the Oslo Accord. Article 3 of the Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum, signed in September 1999, clearly states that these prisoners are to be released.
