Hamas: Swap deal result of resistance

Hamas says Israel’s prisoner swap deal with the Palestinian resistance movement has proved that only resistance can extract the Palestinian people’s rights from the occupiers.

“This exchange has taken place between the resistance and the occupation in a very clear political message that only the resistance can achieve goals for the Palestinians,” Osama Hamdan, a top representative of Hamas in Beirut, told Press TV from the Lebanese capital during a Tuesday telephone interview.

On Tuesday, 477 Palestinian prisoners were released from Israeli jails as the first part of a deal to release 1,027 Palestinian inmates in exchange for Hamas-captured Israeli trooper Gilad Shalit.

The Hamas official stated the Israelis’ recurrent military and diplomatic actions against the resistance movement to force the release of the prisoner had failed and that they were eventually compelled to free the Palestinian prisoners.

It is better for Tel Aviv to release all the Palestinian prisoners in its custody, he asserted.

He went on to say that it’s better for the Tel Aviv side to release all the Palestinian prisoners otherwise the Palestinians would be pushed to capture more Israeli soldiers.

Hamdan asserted that the entire developments leading to the exchange, from the capture of the Israeli soldier to the release of the Palestinian prisoners, had taken place on the Palestinian territories.

He pointed out that 315 of the released prisoners had performed resistance operations against Israel’s acts of aggression.

According to Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and prisoner advocacy groups, there are currently over 6000 Palestinian prisoners, including legislators, in Israeli jails, many of whom have been rounded up without charge or trial. Independent sources put the number of the inmates at 11,000.