Gaza City, April 27: Senior Hamas leader Mahmud al-Zahar said Tuesday a cartoon on the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit did not express the “official position” of the movement.
The cartoon suggested Shalit might die before Israel agrees to a deal to release him.
Another Hamas official clarified that there was no “contradiction” between Zahar’s remarks and the three-minute, three-dimensional cartoon, which he said clearly blamed Shalit’s possible death on Israel delaying a prisoner swap.
“We reject the Zionist interpretation that spins the meaning of the Qassam cartoon,” senior Hamas leader Salah al-Bardawil said in a statement, referring to the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the movement.
“It was clear that the tape blamed the Zionist enemy for the results of the negligence, time wasting, procrastination and deception practiced by successive (Israeli) governments,” he added.
“There is no contradiction between this understanding advanced by the Qassam tape and the statements of Doctor Mahmud al-Zahar about the ethics of the Hamas movement in dealing with prisoners.”
The web video posted on Sunday shows Shalit’s father Noam turning into an old man as he carries a picture of Gilad through empty streets past billboards of past and present Israeli leaders vowing to free his son.
In the end, as a bearded old man with a cane, he receives the body in a coffin at the Gaza border before waking up and realising it was all a dream, as a caption reads “There is still hope.”
Zahar said “we have not and will not kill captive Israeli soldiers,” during a meeting with a South African parliamentary delegation on Monday. “Our morals and our religion prevent us from doing that.”
Hamas, which hopes to exchange Shalit for hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, has repeatedly said he is alive and being treated well.
Negotiations for a possible exchange appeared to hit a dead end in December. Hamas has blamed Israel over the stalled talks.
Hamas and two smaller groups captured Shalit, now 23, in a deadly cross-border raid in June 2006, and are believed to be holding him in a secret location in the besieged Gaza Strip, which is still considered to be under illegal Israeli occupation.
—Agencies