A military judge ordered Shaer to be freed because of "lack of evidence" and no charges were brought against him, his attorney, Osama Al Saadi, said.
Shaer is the most senior Hamas official to be released since Israel arrested scores of members of the hardline movement after its armed wing claimed joint responsibility for the capture of a soldier near the Gaza Strip in late June.
Saadi said that the 44-year-old Shaer, who was held in jail in Petah Tikva near Israel's commercial capital Tel Aviv after his arrest in August, was released after appearing before the judge in a police station.
The minister immediately set out for home in the Nablus region of the northern West Bank and by late afternoon had reached a checkpoint outside the city, according to a local security source.
In a telephone interview broadcast on the pan-Arab television network Al Jazeera, Shaer said that he had been questioned in detention about his political activities and the fate of the captured Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit.
Israeli troops arrested the deputy prime minister, who also serves as education minister in the Hamas-led government, August 19 at dawn in the West Bank political capital of Ramallah.
The military confirmed at the time that his detention was part of a wider clampdown on the Islamist movement Hamas, which Israel and the West consider a terrorist organization for a campaign of suicide attacks in the Jewish state.
Israel arrested more than 60 Hamas officials, including a third of the cabinet and more than two-dozen MPs, after Shalit was captured and two other soldiers killed in a daring raid by Gaza militants.
Twenty-eight MPs, including parliamentary speaker Aziz Dweik, and four cabinet ministers remain in custody. Most of them have been charged with membership in a terrorist organization.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has urged Israel to free detained Hamas ministers and lawmakers before a national unity government is formed between the Islamist movement and his moderate Fatah faction.
© 2006 Agence France-Presse
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