Last update - 00:00 27/06/2007
Hamas said willing to bend on identity of prisoners in swap
By Barak Ravid and Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondent
Hamas is willing to be more flexible on the identity of the Palestinian prisoners it wants released in exchange for kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, according to an Israeli who has been serving as the Shalit family's personal liaison to Hamas.
Gershon Baskin, co-director of the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information, said that Ahmed Yusef, who is Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh's political advisor, told him on Tuesday that "Israel should present a new list, of about 1,000 names, and Hamas will choose the prisoners [to be released] from it according to the number agreed on in the previous negotiations."
Baskin also sent a letter detailing this conversation to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's chief of staff, Yoram Turbowicz.
However, both senior Hamas officials and senior Egyptian officials cautioned on Tuesday that the negotiations over Shalit have been totally frozen for almost four weeks, ever since Hamas-Fatah infighting resumed in Gaza, and therefore, expectations of an imminent breakthrough are likely to prove overly optimistic.
"The negotiations have been at an impasse for some time," said Hamas spokesman Ayman Taha.
Both sets of officials added, however, that negotiations were likely to resume once Hamas feels that it has Gaza firmly under control.
A few months ago, Hamas submitted a list of the 450 prisoners it wants released in exchange for Shalit. Israel has reportedly agreed to this number, but was willing to free only 40 of the specific individuals on Hamas' list, and therefore demanded that the organization submit a new list.
Yusef told Baskin that Hamas was not willing to submit a new list, due to "Israel's wholesale refusal to accept the organization's demands in the first list." However, he added, if Israel were to submit a list of about 1,000 names to Hamas, the organization could then choose the remaining 410 from this list.
Yusef was also interviewed on Channel 10 television on Tuesday, but declined a request by Shalit's father, Noam, to speak with him privately.
Also Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry's political research division submitted an assessment to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni regarding the audiotape of Shalit that Hamas released on Monday. According to this assessment, the fact that Hamas released the tape which proves that Shalit is still alive without receiving anything in return reveals the organization's weakness: Previously, it had said it would only allow a "sign of life" from Shalit if Israel first released some prisoners.
The organization's failure to free BBC journalist Alan Johnston, who was kidnapped by a different Palestinian group, is another sign of its weakness, the paper said.
At a press conference with her Australian counterpart, Alexander Downer, Livni repeated this assessment, adding that the tape also attests to the success of Israel's strategy for dealing with the kidnapping.