JERUSALEM - Israel's cabinet voted on Sunday to release some 200 Palestinian prisoners as a goodwill gesture to president Mahmud Abbas aimed at bolstering slow-moving US-backed peace talks. PM Ehud Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev called the move a "confidence-building measure" towards Abbas, saying "we hope the release will help strengthen the peace process." The list, which will be considered for final approval by a ministerial committee on Monday, will include at least two veteran prisoners implicated in deadly attacks on Israelis in the 1970s, a senior govt official told AFP. They will be a rare exception to Israel's general policy of not releasing those with "blood on their hands," but the official said the security establishment "believes the risk of the release is very low." Israel had first announced the move on August 6 following a face-to-face meeting between Olmert and Abbas, the latest in a series of discussions held since they relaunched peace talks at a US-hosted conference in November. Once the ministerial committee approves the decision, Israelis will be able to appeal against the release of individual prisoners before the actual release takes place on August 25. A spokesman for Abbas called the decision a "step in the right direction," but said the Palestinians had hoped to see more prisoners freed. "President Mahmud Abbas had requested the release of very large numbers of prisoners, eventually leading to the release of all Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails," Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP. There are currently more than 11,000 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, including at least 85 women and children and 11 seriously ill people, according to the Palestinian Authority. The gesture is widely seen as a way of boosting the Western-backed Abbas against the rival Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement, which rules the Gaza Strip, and the Lebanese Hezbollah Shiite militia. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni hailed the decision, saying that "whoever releases prisoners only to Hamas is strengthening Hamas." The release would signal that "whoever engages in dialogue with Israel can be boosted through dialogue and not through the use of force," she added. In July Hezbollah celebrated what it called a major victory when it traded the bodies of two Israeli soldiers for five Lebanese prisoners and the remains of some 200 Lebanese and Palestinian fighters. Hamas has been trying to secure a similar deal to swap Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, seized in a deadly cross-border raid from the Gaza Strip in June 2006, for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Trade and Industry Minister Eli Yishai slammed the decision to release the prisoners, saying it would undermine efforts to free Shalit.