Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/JERUSALEM: Israel’s minister of defense has said that the remains of the Palestinian prisoner who died a day earlier from lung cancer would not be released for burial, on Wednesday.
“Remains to be used as bargaining chip”
According to Arab news, Benny Gantz’s office said the body of Nasser Abu Hamid, one of the founders of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, would be held as the bargaining chip for the return of captive Israelis and the remains of soldiers held by the ‘militant’ group Hamas in Gaza Strip.
Abu Hamid was a former leader of forces wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party. He has been undergoing multiple life sentences since 2002 after being convicted for the deaths of seven Israelis during a second Palestinian intifada and uprising against Israel’s occupation in the early 2000s. Palestinians marched in the West Bank on Tuesday to protest his death.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry said that the families of those four Israelis met with Pope Francis in the Vatican on Wednesday, and the pope expressed deep solidarity with them, especially regarding the suffering of the mothers. Palestinian Authority had called for Abu Hamid’s release as his health deteriorated in recent months, and on Tuesday, blamed Israel for his death.
Gantz rejected the allegations that Israel had any involvement in Abu Hamid’s death. Abu Hamid’s death came in one of the deadliest years in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent decades with the prospects of a negotiated two-state solution increasingly remote.
