Kidnappers Raise Ransom Demand
Hizballah urges the Palestinian terrorists not to release their kidnap victim without getting a ransom.
Lebanon’s Hizbullah terror group, which has swapped kidnapped Israelis for Arab prisoners in the past, urged Palestinian terrorists on Friday to only free an Israeli soldier captured in Gaza exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
“There are 10,000 detainees and there is no method to free them except this method, except this path,” Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah said.
�“I warn the states, governments and political leaders that are pressuring the Palestinian resistance to free this Israeli soldier with nothing in return that the result will be …to close the door entirely on 10,000 detainees in Israeli jails,” he said.
And the kidnappers promptly demand that 1,000 terrorists be released from jail.
GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinian militant factions who captured an Israeli soldier demanded on Saturday that Israel free 1,000 prisoners from its jails and end an assault on Gaza launched to win the soldier’s release.
A statement from the groups — the second since Corporal Gilad Shalit was captured in a raid across Gaza’s frontier on Sunday — appeared to cast doubt on the hopes of mediators that diplomacy could soon get him free and demanded an end to “all Israeli aggression” in the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank.
Israel has said it will not consider releasing prisoners in exchange for Shalit.
“We are declaring to the public our just and humanitarian demands,” said the statement faxed to news agencies by the armed wing of the governing Hamas Islamist group, the Popular Resistance Committees and Army of Islam.
It repeated an earlier demand for the release of women prisoners and minors in exchange for information on Shalit, but made the added request for Israel to free 1,000 “Palestinian, Arab and Muslim prisoners.” It said these would have to include all Palestinian faction leaders as well as humanitarian cases.
The statement did not specify that this would be in exchange for Shalit’s release, but Abu Ubaida, a spokesman for the Hamas armed wing, said that was what it meant.