PA Raises Demands for Release of IDF Captives
15:34 Sep 25, '06 / 3 Tishrei 5767
by Hillel Fendel
While Hamas and Fatah cannot get together on a unity government, they are united in demanding increasingly more for the release of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit.
Shalit was abducted by an eight-man Hamas terrorist cell in late June when he was manning a tank just outside the Gaza border. Two soldiers were killed in that attack.
Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) says that Israel must release Marwan Barghouti and Ahmed Saadat if it wants to see Shalit again. Barghouti is serving five life sentences for the murder of Israelis, while Saadat was the mastermind of the killing of Israel's Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi in 2001.
Not to be outdone, Hamas official Mahmoud A-Zahar says that Israel must release not only female and teenaged terrorists imprisoned in Israel, but all of the long-time terrorist prisoners - including those incarcerated for the murder of Jews.
A-Zahar, a long-time mortal foe of Israel - he told BBC in 2003, "I'm telling you frankly, the attitude of Islam is not to accept a foreign state in this area" - blamed Israel for the lack of progress in the talks on the release of Shalit. Speaking at a gathering in Gaza, the Hamas foreign minister said that Israel was pressuring the PA to lower its demands by closing the Rafah crossing. Hamas currently demands the release of 1,000 terrorist prisoners in exchange for one soldier, according to most reports.
The issue of the terrorists in Israeli prisons has long been an acute one for the PA - largely because PA society views those held as prisoners, and not as terrorists. For example, a senior Hamas leader named Dr. Ahmed Bahar spoke at a recent Gaza gathering and said, "If an Israeli soldier has a mother, we have 10,000 prisoners who also have mothers." He did not mention at all the crimes for which the thousands are being held. Nor did he note that the abducted Israeli is not treated to basic necessities such as contact with his family, as opposed to the incarcerated Arabs.
A spokesman for Hamas said, "Israel will not receive a single snippet of information regarding Shalit's fate and will continue to live in uncertainty regarding his condition, until Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert executes the exchange deal [for the prisoners]."
MK Effie Eitam (National Union) warned Prime Minister Olmert not to cave in to the demand to release Barghouti, saying it would be "moral bankruptcy." Eitam said such a move would "destabilize the framework of law and justice in Israel."
"Abu Mazen's demand to release a murderer of innocent people reveals the true face of the government's new partner," Eitam said. "It proves that the voice is the voice of Abu Mazen, and the hands are those of Hamas."
Israel's two other kidnapped soldiers of this year are Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, abducted by Hizbullah into southern Lebanon on July 12, in an attack that set off the recent war in Lebanon. Their release is barely even being discussed.
Hizbullah chieftain Sheikh Nasrallah Nasrallah "spit in the face of the organized community of nations," according to Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev, when he addressed a mass rally in Beirut over the weekend. Nasrallah said that Hizbullah would not agree to be disarmed under the current Lebanese government, that the terrorist group is now stronger than ever, and that it has more than 20,000 rockets - more than it claimed before the war.
PA Raises Demands for Release of IDF Captives
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