GAZA: Hamas does not agree to Israel’s latest terms for a prisoner swap and has asked a German mediator to continue to pursue a deal, a Hamas official said on Wednesday after leaders of the group ended talks in Damascus.
“The consultations will continue and the negotiations will continue. We cannot say that the deal has reached a dead end. And we cannot say that (the talks were) concluded by a deal,” Ayman Taha told Reuters in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Intensified consultations on both sides raised speculation last week that a deal to free Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive in the Gaza Strip for more than three years, in return for some 1,000 Palestinian prisoners was imminent.
A Hamas source close to the talks said the German mediator who has been shuttling between the sides will begin a new round of negotiations next week.
Palestinian officials have said Israel and Hamas have not agreed on a final list of prisoners to be released, including the fate of about 20 Palestinians who were convicted of deadly attacks on Israelis, and which prisoners will be deported.
Shalit, now 23, was seized by Hamas men who tunneled into Israel from the Gaza Strip in a raid in 2006.
Meanwhile, hints of possible movement in the deadlocked Middle East process have emerged in talks between the leaders of Egypt and Israel, a senior Palestinian official said on Wednesday, without giving details. Palestinian media in the Israeli-occupied West Bank fronted remarks by Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is moving forward.” Netanyahu met Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Tuesday.
In the West Bank, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Reuters there would be movement in the near future. “The region will see important political activities in the next two weeks,” said Nabil Abu Rudainah. “The Israeli position is not yet clear enough to the point of re-starting negotiations,” he added. The United States, whose envoy George Mitchell has been shuttling between the two sides with no concrete signs of progress for the past year, was still working on ways of reviving direct dialogue, it said.
Abbas was due to return to his government capital, Ramallah, on Thursday and deliver a speech marking the 45th anniversary of the foundation of his Fatah movement. He was due to embark on a tour of Arab capitals including Cairo immediately afterward.
On his return to Jerusalem on Wednesday, Netanyahu told members of his Likud party “the time has come to renew the peace process” — a statement he has made repeatedly in recent weeks in appeals to Abbas to return to the negotiating table.
In another development, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that Highway 443, which cuts through the occupied West Bank and links Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, must be open to Palestinian traffic banned since 2002 by the military after attacks on Israeli vehicles. It gave the army five months to formulate new security arrangements for the four-lane road and said the prohibition on Palestinian use would remain in effect until then.
“Freedom of movement is a basic human right and every effort must be made to implement it in territory held by Israel,” Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch said in a ruling in favor of Palestinian villages, located along the highway, that brought the suit.
The decision stirred public debate on Wednesday in Israel and could set a precedent for other legal challenges of Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement in the West Bank, territory captured in a 1967 war.
