Hamas Proposes One-Time Hostage Swap and 5-Year Gaza Truce
Hamas has signaled a willingness to end the Gaza war through a one-time prisoner exchange for all remaining hostages and a five-year cessation of hostilities, a senior movement official told AFP on Saturday. The offer, to be discussed by a Hamas delegation meeting mediators in Cairo, marks a notable softening from the group’s rejection of an earlier Israeli proposal for a 45-day truce in exchange for ten living captives.
“Hamas is ready for an exchange of prisoners in a single batch and a truce for five years,” the anonymous official said. Yet the group remains adamant that any agreement must lead to a full Israeli withdrawal from the Strip and unfettered humanitarian aid, and it will not agree to disarm.
Talks have stalled since Israel resumed its air and ground offensive on March 18, after a two-month ceasefire collapsed over disagreements on sequencing and ultimate war termination. Egypt has recently assumed the lead in mediation, even as Mossad chief David Barnea traveled to Qatar this week to reengage in negotiations.
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This comes as former hostage Ron Krivoi—freed in the November 2023 ceasefire amid a gesture to Russian President Vladimir Putin—spoke publicly for the first time in a televised interview Friday. Krivoi, an Israeli-Russian sound engineer seized at the Nova music festival, recounted 51 days in underground tunnels.
“These aren’t the tunnels you see in pictures,” Krivoi told Channel 12. “We were in something really small, deep underground…no height, no toilets, no food. I lost nine kilograms.” He described sharing a sand-floor cage barely 1.5 meters wide with fellow captives.
Krivoi also detailed the brutal torture of young soldier Matan Angrest, still held by Hamas and “completely, completely terrified.” He said interrogators in Israeli territory began Angrest’s abuse by electrocuting him with car batteries and that subsequent beatings by Gazan captors were “ordinary civilians taking out frustration.”
Krivoi credits his survival to his Russian citizenship: “If I didn’t have it, I could still be in that tunnel with Matan today…It was Putin who brought me home.” Hamas has periodically released Russian nationals, including Maxim Herkin and Bar Kupershtein, as diplomatic gestures.
