Israel frees speaker

The speaker of the Palestinian parliament was freed on Tuesday after serving all but a few weeks of a three-year sentence in an Israeli prison for membership in the banned Hamas resistance movement. Abdel Aziz Dweik is the most senior of dozens of Hamas politicians arrested after Hamas won a majority in the Palestinian parliament in the election of January 2006. Thirty-five more Hamas politicians remain in Israeli custody.

Dweik was detained after Hamas affiliates in Gaza captured an Israeli soldier in a cross-border raid in 2006.