The head of the Hamas political bureau, Khalil al-Hayya, said on Thursday that all remaining captives will be released from Gaza if Israel ends its war on the enclave, reports the Middle East Eye.
Hamas, he said, is ready for “comprehensive package negotiations, including the release of all Israeli captives in exchange for an agreed number of Palestinian prisoners, the complete withdrawal of the occupation army from the Gaza Strip, starting reconstruction, and the lifting of the siege”.
“The leadership of Hamas and the resistance factions are keen to stop the barbaric aggression and genocidal war,” he added, noting that it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who reneged on the ceasefire agreement that started on January 19 and lasted six weeks.
The deal was meant to have three phases, but when it was time for Israel to withdraw from Gaza entirely in Phase two, it re-imposed a total siege on any goods, food, and aid coming into the Strip.
By March 15, Netanyahu had resumed a full-scale war on Gaza.
So far, more than 51,000 Palestinians have been killed over the last year and a half, local health officials said.
Hayya said mediators Egypt and Qatar “returned to communicate with us to find a way out of the crisis created by Netanyahu and his government, and we agreed to their proposal at the end of Ramadan, despite our conviction that Netanyahu insists on continuing the war and aggression to protect his political future”.
The holy month ended on March 30, after which Israel presented a counterproposal that Hayya said bore “impossible conditions”, demanding that Hamas disarm its ranks.
“This is a natural right of our people,” to resist occupation, he said.
Hamas, he said, will not be “part of Netanyahu’s policy of partial agreements” as the group is seeking a permanent end to the war, not a temporary truce.
In that vein, Hamas’s “comprehensive package” offer also includes talks toward a full accounting by Israel of all Palestinian prisoners, both from the occupied West Bank and Gaza, in exchange for the list of Israeli captives remaining in Gaza. The names would then be proposed for swaps.
Senior representatives from Hamas came close to an independent agreement directly with the US over captive exchanges last month, when on President Donald Trump’s orders, his hostage envoy, Adam Boehler, went to Doha to engage in unprecedented face-to-face meetings.
According to sources that briefed The New York Times, the secret meetings were making progress until the Israelis caught wind of them and then leaked them to the media. Things fell apart quickly.
In his Thursday remarks, Hayya commended Boehler’s comments to Al Jazeera earlier this week, in which he pledged that Israel’s war on Gaza would end “immediately” if all the captives there are released.
