Qassam Brigades negotiating to swap Gilad Shalit for Ahmed Saadat, others

Qassam Brigades: No swap deal not including senior prisoners

[ 15/02/2009 - 08:23 PM ]

GAZA, (PIC)– The armed wing of the Hamas Movement, the Qassam Brigades, has expressed absolute rejection of any prisoners’ swap deal with the Israeli occupation authority that does not include senior Palestinian resistance captives. Abu Obeida, the QB spokesman, said in a press statement published by Palestine Today website on Sunday that if the IOA was really interested in concluding the exchange deal it should release “all those included on the list we have tabled”. He would not go into details of the negotiations on the deal, stressing that the four senior leaders Ahmed Saadat, PFLP secretary general, and the commanders in the QB Abdullah Al-Barghouthi, Ibrahim Hamed and Abbas Al-Sayyed, should be included in the deal. The QB spokesman also rejected attempts to link the deal to any other file such as calm or opening of crossings, stressing that the exchange deal is a separate issue. The Israeli minister of internal security, Avi Dichter, had said that his government would release a big number of Palestinian prisoners in return for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Palestinian resistance, but underlined that if those four mentioned above persons were released the IOA would not allow their return to their homeland. Press reports had earlier suggested that the IOA was refusing the release of those four in particular. For his part, Dr. Ismail Radwan, one of Hamas’s political leaders in Gaza, said that Israeli premier Ehud Olmert’s statement that no calm agreement would be signed without releasing Shalit was political maneuvering. He explained that Olmert wanted to make a kind of achievement before he leaves office along with his scandals. Hamas does not mind expediting the exchange deal if the IOA agreed to the conditions, Barhoum said.