Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu “has reneged on a key provision” in the prisoner swap deal for releasing the kidnapped Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, a senior source close to the negotiations told Fox News. The source also said that the negotiator for Israel, Haggai Hadass, who was appointed by Netanyahu, is on the verge of resigning his post.
According to the report, Netanyahu had earlier agreed to allow some Hamas prisoners who have Israeli blood on their hands to be released to their homes in Judea and Samaria. Now he is demanding they be released either to Gaza, where they can do less damage because they are behind a security wall, or be exiled abroad.
Israeli media are quoting the report. Israeli journalists have complained bitterly in the past weeks that IDF censorship is preventing them from reporting what they know about the Shalit negotiations, and that they therefore have no choice but to quote foreign sources. Israeli journalists sometimes leak information that they are not allowed to directly report to foreign news media, and then quote the foreign reports. It is not known if this was the case here.
The source quoted by Fox News also says the Netanyahu government inherited the negotiations from the government of Ehud Olmert at a disadvantage. It quoted the source as saying: “Our opening position was worse than we had hoped for. We first had to fix the mistakes of the past. It wasn’t possible to fix everything. We have succeeded in achieving a better result than the one achieved by the previous team.”