maven password or parameter using special characters

I am using maven jarsigner plugin and ant to make the last part of the deployment to move the jar to the server that I need, I am not using any pipeline tool like jenkins or circle ci.

I don't want to expose my password, so, I set a property in settings.xml maven configuration file with the password like:

<profile>
            <id>keystorePassword</id>
            <properties>
                <keystorePassword>passwordwith&amp;therestofpassword</keystorePassword>
            </properties>
            <activation>
                <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
            </activation>
        </profile>

Then try to load the property in the pom file when calling the jar signer plugin:

<plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-jarsigner-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>3.1.0</version>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <id>sign</id>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>sign</goal>
                        </goals>
                    </execution>
                    <execution>
                        <id>verify</id>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>verify</goal>
                        </goals>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
                <configuration>
                    <keystore>${project.basedir}\${keystorePath}</keystore>
                    <alias>${aliasName}</alias>
                    <storepass>${keystorePassword}</storepass>
                    <certs>true</certs>
                    <tsa>http://timestamp.digicert.com</tsa>
                    <storetype>pkcs12</storetype>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>

However, as you can see the password value has an & (passwordwith&therestofthepassword) and when run the mvn package I having the following error message

[WARNING] 'therestofthepasssword' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
[WARNING] operable program or batch file.

It is splitting the password after the & and seeing therestofthepassword as part of the command

I tried the following approaches all with the same result:

1. &
2. &

I tried to populate the password using parameter like -DkeystorePassword="passwordwith&therestofthepassword" and it worked fine, however, I do not want to use the parameter to set the password value and I want to use the settings.xml file.

I also tried to set the password directly in the pom.xml file in the storepass tag having the same result.

Is there a way to set the password with special characters in settings.xml