All captives will be released from Gaza if Israel agrees to end war, Hamas says
The group says it's ready to negotiate a
‘comprehensive package’ that accounts for every Palestinian held in Israel
By MEE staff
Published date: 18 April 2025
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.
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 19 January 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 reimposed a
total siege on any goods, food, and aid coming into the Strip.
By 15 March, 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 30 March, 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.
The deal
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.
Washington designated Hamas a
terrorist organisation in 1996.
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.
But Boehler also put the ball
wholly in Hamas’s court.
“They can reach out any time,”
he said. “Hamas can end this.”
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