CAIRO, August 9. /TASS/. The Hamas movement has handed over to mediators its conditions for a truce agreement in the Gaza Strip with Israel, such as a demand for the release of a number of prominent Palestinian figures from Israeli jails the Egyptian portal Al-Youm as-Sabia has said.
According to its sources in Hamas, the demand concerns primarily one of the leaders of the Fatah movement, Marwan Barghouti, and the secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Ahmad Saadat. The source notes that the demand for the release of these prisoners should be seen as "Hamas' desire to achieve national unity" among Palestinians.
The portal claims that as another condition of the deal, the radicals put forward the release of "all leaders of Palestinian movements arrested under far-fetched pretexts and held in Israeli jails for decades," as well as all female and juvenile detainees, especially those arrested after October 7, 2023. Hamas, the Al-Youm as-Sabia’s source stressed, is interested in further negotiations with Israel, but "on the condition the other side has a real political will" and if the Jewish state authorities empower their delegates to participate in consultations and conclude an agreement.
Marwan Barghouti has been imprisoned since 2004. An Israeli court sentenced him to five life terms on charges of killing five people by organizing terrorist attacks. Ahmed Saadat was sentenced to 30 years in 2008 for organizing the assassination of Israel’s Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi in Jerusalem in 2001.
Call for talks
On Friday night, the leaders of Egypt, Qatar and the US issued a joint statement calling on Israel and Hamas to resume cease-fire talks in the Gaza Strip on August 15 in Doha or Cairo. The mediators also signaled their readiness to submit a final proposal outlining the parameters of a possible agreement on a Gaza ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages, based on the principles put forward by US President Joe Biden and supported by UN Security Council Resolution 2735.
An hour after the publication of the mediators' declaration, the Israeli authorities expressed their readiness to send a delegation to participate in the talks on August 15. Hamas has not yet officially announced its possible participation in the new round of consultations.
The latest aggravation of the situation in the Middle East was provoked by the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas political bureau. He was killed on July 31 in Tehran, where he had arrived for the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Afterward, Qatar's head of government and foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman Al-Thani, called into question the effectiveness of mediation in talks between Israel and Hamas. The Iranian authorities blamed Israel for Haniyeh's murder and threatened the Jewish state with retaliation.