Hamdan: Hamas determined to achieve honorable prisoners’ swap deal

Hamdan: Hamas determined to achieve honorable prisoners’ swap deal

Osama Hamdan, member of Hamas’s political bureau, has revealed Saturday that the indirect prisoners’ swap negotiations with the Israeli occupation authority (IOA) were still continuing, describing them as difficult.

In an interview with the Safa press agency, Hamdan disclosed that the IOA failed to pass a swap deal which is not acceptable for us after it tried to influence the negotiators and the negotiation process but it failed.

In this regard, the Hamas official pointed out that his Movement understands the feelings of the Palestinian prisoners and their families, but he underlined that Hamas was and still is determined to achieve an honorable deal to the Palestinian people.

Hamdan also explained that the tour of Hamas’s leadership in a number of Arab and Muslim countries was meant to achieve three goals; the first was to discuss developments in the region after the failure of the peace process.

The second, Hamdan said, was to explain Hamas’s stand towards all issues, particularly the Palestinian national reconciliation, stressing that Hamas was and still is keen on making the reconciliation succeed but, he added, it needs an Arab support to achieve it.

And the third objective, he noted, was to rally more Arab and Muslim support to the Palestinian people and to rescind the suffocating unjust siege on the Gaza Strip.

“Hamas is a national Palestinian Movement that could never abandon its Arab and Muslim background … anyone who misunderstands the Movement, then it is his problem and not Hamas’s problem”, Hamdan underscored.

In this regard, Hamdan regretted the unfortunate confrontations at the Egyptian borders with Gaza, explaining that the Palestinian interior ministry started an investigation to clear matters.

“We regret the death of an Egyptian soldier in the confrontations, and we consider him as one of Palestine’s martyrs”, Hamdan stressed.

However, Medical sources in the Egyptian Sinai peninsula revealed that the soldier was mistakenly killed with bullets of his comrades shooting at Palestinian youths protesting the Egyptian mistreatment of the lifeline convoy.

Hamdan emphasized that what had happened at the borders shouldn’t be exaggerated, and that it should serve as a push for more Palestinian-Egyptian understanding, castigating the stand of the Ramallah authority over the events.

“Egypt should have greater role to help the people of Gaza, and not to suffocate Gaza, and we all hope to see Egypt restore its national role again in serving the Palestinian and Arab issues”, Hamdan highlighted.

When asked about the new Palestinian and Arab ideas to revive the peace settlement, Hamdan ruled out that such ideas could solve the problem, charging that enemies of the Palestinian people want to liquidate the Palestinian issue rather than solve it.

He asserted, “The peace process is dead, and I believe that anyone accepting the Israeli conditions in the negotiations’ game would lose; and therefore, there should be an overall review of the this path because it is a closed tunnel and leads to a dead end”.