Israeli officials and citizens are rethinking their strategy on how to tackle prisoners of war as the third anniversary of the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit approaches.
Gilad Shalit, 22, was captured by Hamas and three other armed organizations on June 25, 2006, during his mandatory military service on the Gazan border. He remains in captivity, supposedly in the Gaza Strip.
A report in the Palestinian Maan News Agency on Tuesday said Shalit was being transferred to Egypt ahead of a prisoner exchange deal which would result in his being returned to Israel, but this allegation was denied by both Israelis and Palestinians.
“It’s rumors and it has no basis,” Ahmad Yousuf, the Hamas government’s deputy foreign minister in Gaza, told The Media Line.
“This issue needs a lot of time even to restore negotiations and start from where we reached over the last couple of months,” he said.
Egypt has been the primary mediator in the Israel-Hamas negotiation attempts to hammer out a prisoner bartering deal.
Hamas is demanding that 450 prisoners be released in the first stage of the deal, and 500 additional prisoners released at a later stage.
Israel is reluctant to release any member of Hamas, which it designates a terror organization. Jerusalem is especially concerned that the released prisoners will resume terror activities against Israeli civilians.
Shalit’s father, Noam Shalit, said the reports that his son was being transferred were not concrete.
“We’ve learned not to put too much into these spins and quack reports,” Shalit told The Media Line. “It’s not the first time this has happened; we’ve seen quite a few things like this in the past.”
The failure to release Shalit is prompting some soul searching on official levels and within Israeli society.
The Israeli government has set up a committee that will draw guidelines for any future negotiations over Israeli POWs. The committee, established by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, will reportedly discuss a price tag for any future cases in which soldiers are abducted.
The committee, headed by former president of the Israeli Supreme Court, Meir Shamgar, has yet to submit its proposals.
Shamgar denied reports that the committee will recommend Israel not to release live prisoners in exchange for dead soldiers’ bodies.
“We have not formulated an opinion yet and haven’t submitted a report,” Shamgar told Israel’s Army Radio.
Shlomo Ben Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister and negotiator, said he did not think the concept behind the committee was wise.
"It is a nonsensical idea," he told The Media Line. "A government cannot limit its own maneuver capability in future scenarios. It needs to always maintain its flexibility when dealing with crisis situations.
“Such a price list would not impress the potential abductors,” he continued. “For all practical purposes, an informal price list exists, and the proof is that Israel is unwilling to meet the demands of Hamas for a Shalit deal because it considers them too high. But this does not impress Hamas, and they adamantly refuse to reduce their conditions. “
The impact of the Shalit case is also trickling down to a younger generation of Israelis, who are weighing their options as they face their upcoming military service.
The Israeli news portal Ynet interviewed a teenage boy called Guy, a pre-army twelfth grader, to ask if the Shalit situation has affected his peers’ thoughts about their future army service. Guy said some youngsters were afraid and reluctant to go to the army—especially to combat units—because of what happened to Gilad Shalit.
“I think this fear is legitimate but there’s no other option,” he said.
Regarding efforts to bring Shalit home, he said, “I think we’ve reached the point of no return and the abduction has had a major impact on many teenagers, and on their views of the Israel Defense Forces and on the state.”
The contradictory reports on Shalit’s pending release came as ‘Aziz Dweik, speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, was released from an Israeli prison on Tuesday, after serving three years in jail.
Dweik, 60, was detained with dozens of other PLC members shortly after Shalit was captured in 2006, in effect paralyzing the Palestinian parliament.
He was accused of belonging to Hamas, which Israel designates a terror organization.
Dweik does not deny running for parliament on the Change and Reform list, which belongs to Hamas, but rejects accusations of links to terrorism.
His lawyer, Fadi Qawasmi, said the original thinking behind the arrests was to use Dweik and the other PLC members as bargaining chips to help secure the release of Shalit.
However, three years on, Qawasmi said Israel realized this tactic was wrong.
“As time went by, Israel and the authorities saw that the arrest didn’t affect Hamas or the decision regarding Shalit,” he told The Media Line.
“At first they thought they could bargain with them but now they think of them as a burden and they want to end this whole case as fast as possible.”
Mahmoud A-Zahhar, a prominent leader of the Hamas organization based in Gaza, recently told Israel Radio that Shalit’s release would have to include the release of Palestinian prisoners, in accord with Hamas demands.
“It won’t be done through messages and correspondences. It has to be done through an exchange,” he said.
A-Zahhar added that the previous round of talks was scrapped because Israel was not willing to yield to Hamas’ demands to release Palestinian prisoners from eastern Jerusalem, and Arab citizens of Israel.
He said Israel was thwarting any attempts to reach an agreement because it preferred to pinpoint the soldier’s location and release him through a military operation.
Israel charges that Hamas’s positions, as presented in the Egyptian-mediated negotiations, are thwarting the possibility of reaching a deal to bring the soldier home.
Shalit’s exact whereabouts are unclear and international organizations such as the Red Cross have not been given access to see him.
However, there have been signs of life from Gilad in form of a recorded message and a letter.
A high-level Egyptian delegation reportedly arrived in Israel on Tuesday in order to press for a deal to release Shalit.
Pro-Shalit activists demonstrated at the Kerem Shalom crossing between Gaza and Israel, near where Shalit was kidnapped, on Tuesday morning, and blocked the crossing. They said similar protests would take place over the next month, as Shalit begins his fourth year in captivity.