Several countries contacted Hamas to get information about Israeli captives

Senior Hamas leadership figure Musa Abu Marzouk said in a statement released on the Palestinian movement’s website that several countries had contacted Hamas to get information about the Israeli soldiers held as prisoners by the Gaza Strip’s rulers.

These remarks came just hours after the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, announced that Hamas had received several mediation proposals to carry out a prisoner swap with Israel.

Abu Marzouk said that his movement told those countries that “Israel has to respect the last prisoner swap before starting talking about a new one.”

Read: Prisoner swaps between Hamas and Israel are a sensitive issue

Hamas has several times renewed its conditions to start talking about a new prisoner exchange deal with Israel who have been re-imprisoning all the former Palestinian prisoners after they were released following the last deal reached in 2011. Hamas is demanding that these prisoners be released once more before any further talks go ahead.

Currently, 60 former prisoners, from those released in the 2011’s swap, are back inside Israeli prisons and not on any new charges, rights groups have said.

Hamas has been refusing to reveal any information about the Israeli captives its military wing say are in its custody.

During the 2014’s Israeli offensive on Gaza, Israel announced that it lost two soldiers, but have stressed that they believe those soldiers were killed.

However, Al-Qassam did not say whether they are dead or alive, but hinted that at least one of them is surely alive because it previously said that he fainted when he watched the funeral of his father. Israel also said that it lost two of its citizens that Al-Qassam have said are in its custody.