April 28, 2010 - The Daily Star - Gaza Hamas downplays internal dispute over prisoner cartoon

Sakher Abu El Oun
Agence France Presse

GAZA CITY: Hamas sought to downplay on Tuesday a rare public disagreement between one of its top leaders and its powerful armed wing over a cartoon warning Israel about the possible fate of a captive soldier.
Senior Hamas leader Mahmud al-Zahar said the cartoon did not express the “official position” of the movement because it suggested Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier, might one day be returned to his family in a coffin.
But Hamas insisted there was no “contradiction” between Zahar’s remarks and the three-minute, three-dimensional cartoon it 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 grim web video posted on Sunday shows Shalit’s father Noam turning into an old man as he carries a picture of Shalit 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 realizing it was all a dream, as a caption on the screen reads “There is still hope.”
Zahar said the video “does not express the official position of the Hamas movement” because it implied Shalit’s captors might kill him.
“We have not and will not kill captive Israeli soldiers,” he told reporters during a meeting with a South African parliamentary delegation on Monday. “Our morals and our religion prevent us from doing that,” he added.
Hamas, which hopes to exchange Shalit for hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, including several political leaders and top militants, has repeatedly said he is alive and being treated well.
Negotiations for a possible exchange appeared to hit a dead end in December, when Israel presented an offer through a German mediator to which Hamas has yet to officially respond. Each side has blamed the other over the stalled talks.
Hamas and two smaller militant 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 Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas since June 2007.
Hamas has killed captive Israeli soldiers in the past, most notably during the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in 1989, when militants captured and killed soldiers Ilan Saadon and Avi Sasportas.
One of the militants responsible for the killing, Mahmud al-Mabhuh, was found dead in a Dubai hotel room earlier this year after a hit widely blamed on Israel’s Mossad spy agency.