Hamas: Israel dragging feet on prisoner swap with Gaza

A senior Palestinian resistance movement Hamas official says Israel is dragging its feet on the exchange of Palestinian prisoners in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Zaher Jabbarin said on Sunday there was no progress because the Israeli side was not taking any serious steps.

Hamas has provided a general framework for a prisoner swap, but the occupying regime keeps procrastinating, he said.

Israeli authorities are playing internal politics and are after electoral gains at the expense of the Palestinian prisoners, Jabbarin said. Hamas would continue to support the Palestinian prisoners, he added, until they are freed.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Jabbarin said Hamas’s political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh had already undertaken serious efforts to form a united front comprising all the Palestinian factions to expose violations against inmates in Israeli prisons.

Hamas has time and again reaffirmed that Israeli prisoners in Gaza will not see the light of day until Palestinian inmates are released.

Israeli forces arrested about 365 Palestinians, including women and children, in November.: Report

Israeli forces arrested about 365 Palestinians, including 50 women and children, in November, a report says.

In Gaza, there are four Israeli captives, including two soldiers identified as Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul who were captured during the Israeli war on Gaza in 2014.

In April 2016, the armed wing of Hamas, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, announced it held four Israeli captives without saying anything about their fate.

The resistance movement managed to free more than a thousand Palestinian detainees from Israeli jails in the Wafaa al-Aharar (‘True Promise of Free Men’) prisoner swap deal with the regime in 2011.

More than 7,000 Palestinians are reportedly held in Israeli jails. Hundreds have been incarcerated under the practice of administrative detention, which allows holding Palestinian inmates without trial or charge. Some Palestinian prisoners have been held in administrative detention for up to eleven years.

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