Israel is willing to negotiate with Hamas through intermediaries to secure the release of soldiers’ bodies and civilians in Hamas captivity in Gaza, the Prime Minister’s Office said on Tuesday.
“The coordinator for captives and missing people, Yaron Bloom, and his staff, together with the National Security Council and the defense establishment, are prepared to act constructively with a goal to return the bodies and missing people and end this matter, and call for an immediate discussion through intermediaries,” the Prime Minister’s Office statement read.
Hamas has held the bodies of IDF soldiers Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin since Operation Protective Edge in 2014, and has civilians Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed in captivity.
The Prime Minister's Office statement came a day after Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar offered a prisoner exchange.
Sinwar said on Friday that he is “ready to make partial concessions on our prisoners issue in exchange for Israel's release of elderly prisoners, patients and female prisoners as a humanitarian gesture in light of the coronavirus crisis,” according to Al-Monitor.
A Hamas official told KAN that Israel did not respond in any way, and posited that Netanyahu does not want to deal with the matter.
Representatives of the Goldin and Shaul families, like their legal adviser, Michal Cotler-Wunsh, have called for reciprocity, by which the bodies would be returned, because Israel has been providing and facilitating the transfer of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Defense Minister Naftali Bennett said last week that “there is talk of the humanitarian world in Gaza… Israel also has humanitarian needs, which are mainly the recovery of the fallen” – meaning Goldin and Shaul – “and I think that we need to enter a broad dialogue about Gaza’s and our humanitarian needs. It would not be right to disconnect these things.”
Over the weekend, Sinwar threatened to attack Israel if Gazans died from the coronavirus.
“If a time comes when we have no choice but to watch our citizens breathe their final breaths, and when there are no ventilators… we will make six million Israeli settlers unable to breathe,” Sinwar said.
Israel is concerned about not having enough respirators for its own citizens who contract the coronavirus, and has made several fruitless attempts to purchase more from other countries, which have since blocked exports of the medical equipment.
Sinwar also compared Defense Minister Naftali Bennett to Shylock, a Jewish character in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, seen by many as an antisemitic stereotype.
“The Merchant of Venice gave people loans, and when the time came and they could not repay their debts, he started to cut off their flesh as payment...This is the common practice of Bennett and of the entire Zionist system,” Sinwar said on Friday.
Alex Winston and Reuters contributed to this report.