Hamas chief offers military deal, says Israeli soldier alive
LONDON (AFP) — Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal has renewed an offer to Israel to strike only military targets, in a television interview on Monday in which he also said an Israeli soldier seized in 2006 is still alive.
Speaking to British broadcaster Sky News, he also invited Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas to Gaza for unconditional talks on the two factions' divisions.
On the proposed deal with Israel, Meshaal said he was renewing an offer first made 10 years ago.
"We renew our offer to Israel to let the civilians on both sides not be a part of this conflict," he said, adding that if Israel agreed not to kill Palestinian civilians, Hamas would only attack Israeli military targets.
"We renew this offer today," he told the broadcaster in an undisclosed location in Damascus, where he lives in exile.
Meshaal, who himself survived an Israeli assassination attempt in 1997, also said that Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, captured by Palestinian militants in June 2006, is still alive and being treated well.
"Gilad is still alive and we are treating him in a good way while the Israelis treat our prisoners badly and everyone knows that," he said.
Shalit was seized on June 25, 2006 from an army base near Gaza by militants from three groups including Hamas, which evicted Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas' Fatah group from the territory in a week of bloody clashes last June.
Last April, Hamas, via Egyptian intermediaries, gave Israel a list of 450 prisoners it wanted freed in exchange for Shalit.
But an Israeli official said at the time that many of the prisoners had "blood on their hands" meaning they had been involved in attacks that killed Israelis, and could not be released.
Earlier this month, senior Hamas leader Mahmud al-Zahar warned that Shalit would only be released if all the group's demands were met.
On talks with the Palestinian president, Meshaal said: "We invite Mr Mahmud Abbas to come to Gaza to talk directly without any conditions... to work together to find a solution to the problems in Gaza and the West Bank."
The aim of the talks would be "get back our Palestinian union and find the reasons for our problems and to solve the security problem," he added.
The invitation comes after rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Abbas' Fatah reached a Yemeni-brokered deal on March 23 to open their first direct talks since the Islamists seized control of the Gaza Strip nine months ago.
But within hours of signing that agreement, the two bitter rivals bickered over its meaning, with Hamas focusing on the first part of the statement while Fatah highlighted the second as a precondition for any talks.
And the day after the deal was struck, a senior Israeli official warned Abbas against striking a reconciliation deal with Hamas, saying it would effectively sink faltering Middle East peace talks.
The Hamas seizure of Gaza effectively split the Palestinian territories into two separate entities with the Islamists controlling the impoverished coastal strip and Abbas ruling the occupied West Bank.
Israel considers the radical Islamist movement, which is committed to the destruction of the Jewish state, to be a terror group and refuses to have any direct dealings with it.
Also in the interview, Meshall said that while Hamas did not deny the Holocaust, "we believe the Zionists have exaggerated the numbers to get sympathy from other nations".
