GAZA CITY: Ahmed Youssef, a senior Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, said it was too soon to declare prisoner-exchange talks between Israel and Hamas a failure and that the group still required more time to formulate a deal that would see the release of captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the English website of Haaretz reported on Saturday.
“Even the German mediator is still studying the progress made in past talks,” Youssef said.
He added that it would take more than a few days or weeks.
“There are points of serious disagreement alongside points that can be resolved,” he said, adding that Israel was still refusing to release Palestinian prisoners sentenced to particularly long jail terms whose freedom Hamas is demanding in exchange for Shalit.
Israel has said in the past that there were several prisoners on Hamas’ list that it was willing to release on the condition they not be allowed to return to Gaza. Youssef explained that the contention between Hamas and Israel was not over whether to release these prisoners to the West Bank, Gaza, or elsewhere, but rather over their very release.
Hamas captured Shalit in a cross-border raid in 2006. Since then, Hamas and Israel have been holding indirect talks on exchanging Shalit for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
On Thursday, Shalit’s father Noam arrived at the Karni border crossing between Israel and Gaza to deliver a package addressed to his son on the occasion of the Jewish New Year holiday. Gaza resident and reporter Sami Abid took the package and assured the father that it would reach his son.
The package contained, among other things, letters from Shalit’s family, apples, pomegranates, honey, a shirt, hygiene products, a bottle of wine and candy. In exchange for the delivery of the package, Israel permitted the delivery of 100 copies of the Qur’an to Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
In related news, Israel on Saturday refused a Palestinian request to allow new goods into the Gaza Strip, which has suffered under a strict blockade. Israel has said no cargo shipments to Gaza would be allowed to pass into the territory before Hamas releases Shalit.
Since Hamas seized the territory in June 2007 95 percent of the goods traded in the Gaza’s market have been smuggled through tunnels underneath the Gaza-Egypt border.
“Israeli officials told us that no new items would enter the Gaza Strip,” said Raeed Fatouh, Gaza commercial crossings coordinator.
