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Israel gets soldier video in swap for prisoners
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Israel gets soldier video in swap for prisoners
AFP - Saturday, October 3
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JERUSALEM (AFP) - – Israel freed 19 Palestinian women prisoners on Friday in a swap for footage showing soldier Gilad Shalit looking healthy after more than three years in captivity at the hands of Gaza militants.
"Gilad appeared in good health and this reinforces our responsibility to bring him home," Defence Minister Ehud Barak told the Shalit family in a telephone call.
Israeli media said the video, which lasts two minutes and 40 seconds, shows a healthy-looking, clean-shaven Shalit speaking coherently to the camera and holding up a copy of a Gaza newspaper dated September 14.
The Shalit family saw the video after military chief-of-staff Gabi Ashkenazi assessed it and gave the green light for the prisoner release, officials said.
"This is the first step," Shalit's father Noam told AFP. "Now it's a new countdown" to Shalit's hoped-for release, he said, adding that he was "not particularly" optimistic that his son would be freed soon.
Media said the footage would be made public at a later date.
In the West Bank, friends, relatives and officials cheered and wept as the released Palestinian women passed a checkpoint on their way to a ceremony hosted by Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in Ramallah.
The women left the Israeli prison where they were being held early Friday, with 18 later driven to the West Bank and one into Gaza. One more prisoner is to be freed in coming days.
"To exchange one minute of Gilad Shalit for 20 ladies is a big victory," said Qiffah Afanah, who served nine months for assaulting a soldier.
She cried with joy as she hugged her father at the Ofer checkpoint where relatives, friends and officials cheered their homecoming.
In the Gaza Strip, Fatima al-Zaq stood stony-faced at a welcome ceremony hosted by the Hamas rulers of the Palestinian territory, holding her son Yusuf who was born while she was behind bars in Israel.
"Thank God and Hamas," she told the crowd, adding: "The joy will not be complete without the release of all the prisoners, especially the women."
Zaq and a niece of hers were arrested at Erez in May 2007, allegedly on their way to carry out suicide attacks in Israel. Zaq, then 39, was two months pregnant with her ninth child.
Israeli officials stressed that Friday's swap did not herald Shalit's imminent release, but was meant as a confidence-building measure ahead of "decisive stages in the negotiations."
The deal was a major breakthrough after nearly three years of on-again, off-again Egyptian-brokered negotiations between Israel and Hamas. German mediators also joined the talks in July.
It was the first time Israel has released prisoners as part of the talks, and the first video footage of Shalit since his capture. Previously his family had received an audio recording and several letters.
France on Friday called for the soldier, who also holds French nationality, to be freed immediately.
Cairo has been trying to broker a deal under which hundreds of Palestinian prisoners would be released in exchange for Shalit, who has been held in Gaza since he was seized in a deadly cross-border raid in June 2006.
Shalit, now 23, was seized after Gaza militants, including Hamas, tunnelled out of the Palestinian territory and attacked an Israeli army post, killing two soldiers.
With the exception of Zaq, all the women released are from the West Bank and none has been directly implicated in killing Israelis.
"Today is like a huge party," said Nisrin Hamdan, 26, who showed up at the Ofer checkpoint with her siblings, all wearing T-shirts bearing a picture of their 60-year-old mother, held for assisting a suicide bomber.
"My mother has been absent for seven years and today we will have her in our home."
A total of 7,200 Palestinians are in Israeli prisons, and those freed on Friday were among 60 women prisoners. The prisons service says 320 are under 18 years old.
"We are a people who do not forget their prisoners," said Ismail Haniya, the prime minister of the Hamas government in Gaza, calling the swap a "victory for the resistance."
In Ramallah, Abbas called the swap "a victory for us and for the prisoners' families."
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