Hamas says Zionist bombings endanger 'half of the living Israeli prisoners', but it won't evacuate them

The Palestinian resistance insists that only immediate negotiations will safely return the Israeli captives.

The fresh set of Israeli evacuation orders in Gaza directly endanger “half of the living Israeli prisoners,” Al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida announced on April 4. “We have decided not to transfer these prisoners from these areas,” he added.

As Israeli bombings have increasingly intensified since the self-proclaimed Jewish state abandoned its January ceasefire agreement with Hamas and resumed bombing the besieged Palestinians round the clock beginning March 18, it has killed over 1,000 innocent Palestinian civilians, at a rate of 100 fatalities a day, over half of them children. Israel ceased all aid into Gaza from March 2 and subsequently cut off electricity that ran the desalination plants, pushing the enclave’s residents — who somehow survived over a year of relentless bombings — without food and water and to the brink of famine.

With full license from the leading world powers and impotent so-called “international organisations” to do as they please, the Israelis have been intensifying their barbarism with each passing day. After two weeks of unceasing airstrikes and troop movements in other parts of the Gaza Strip, Israel began ground operations in northern Gaza, the site of its humiliating defeat in the lead-up to the January ceasefire, on Friday.

As Israel’s barbarism accelerates, Abu Obeida, the spokesman of Hamas’s armed wing, Al-Qassam Brigades, has warned that it directly puts the captive Israelis in the firing line. He added that the Palestinian resistance doesn’t plan to transfer the captives from the targeted areas and the only way to save them from the bombings of their fellow countrymen is to “immediately negotiate their evacuation or release.”

Abu Obeida released the following four messages on his official Telegram channel:

Half of the living Israeli prisoners are located in areas in which the Israeli occupation army has requested to be evacuated in recent days.

We have decided not to transfer these prisoners from these areas, and to keep them under strict security measures, which are extremely dangerous to their lives.

If the enemy is concerned about the lives of these prisoners, they must immediately negotiate their evacuation or release.

The Netanyahu government bears full responsibility for the lives of the prisoners. Had they been concerned about them, they would have adhered to the agreement signed in January. Most of them would probably be in their homes today.

This is the latest in Hamas’s attempt to get the Israelis to cease their bombings and restart negotiations in earnest.

In a video that Hamas released on March 24, two Israeli prisoners, who identify themselves as Prisoner number 21 and Prisoner number 22, are seen pleading with their government to get them out. They talk about the difficult conditions of captivity, a brief hope for freedom during the ceasefire, and renewed agony as Israel resumed its genocidal assault. They implore a former captive Ohad Ben Ami, who stayed in the same location as them before his release during the prisoner exchanges earlier this year, to speak for them.

“Ohad, why don’t you tell them?” says Prisoner number 22. “You were with us. You were sitting with us. Speak for us.” Later in the video the two prisoners repeatedly scream in unison, “Tell them, Ohad”.

Since Palestinian resistance keeps them updated with news from Israel, they two prisoners are probably aware that Ohad has been keeping himself busy doing propaganda tours with the Israeli leadership since his release, talking about “our Israeli-Jewish spirit,” praising the genocidaires extraordinaire in the Israeli military, and offering such platitudes as “Stay strong. God willing, you’ll get out” to his compatriots still in Gaza.

On March 29, Hamas released a second video featuring the Prisoner number 22 from the March 24 video. In it, the Israeli soldier rhetorically asks the Israeli leadership, “You defend your respected workers, don’t you know how to defend me?!”

But these pleas from its soldiers as well as ceasefire overtures from Hamas and the mediators in Egypt and Qatar have fallen on deaf Israeli ears as they show zero appetite for a peaceful resolution and appear hell bent on the complete extermination of the Palestinians from their ancestral land. Netanyahu has been explicit about it.

“Hamas will lay down its weapons,” Netanyahu recently declared. “Its leaders will be allowed to leave. We will see to the general security in the Gaza Strip and will allow the realisation of the Trump plan for voluntary migration.” He went on to add:
“This is the plan. We are not hiding this and are ready to discuss it at any time…We have an alliance with the greatest superpower in the world.”

In effect, Netanyahu wants Hamas to disarm voluntarily, leave their homes, pave the way for Israeli occupation, which will see to it that none of the Palestinians remain inside Gaza! “This is the plan.”

Hamas, which abided by all the terms of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, has consistently shown a willingness to come to common terms with the Israelis and stop the bloodshed of its people. To that end, the leading Palestinian faction even accepted another Egyptian ceasefire proposal late last month. However, what was always known to the Palestinians and those who closely follow the events in Palestine, has become increasingly clear to the whole world: the Israelis want nothing but all of Palestine (and large chunks of its neighbouring countries, including but not limited to Lebanon and Syria both of which it has been bombing relentlessly for several months now) without the natives.

Israel will wreak every barbarity to that end even if it means killing its own Jewish prisoners in Gaza.

Israel killed hundreds of its own citizens on October 7 and has since gone on to kill dozens of Israeli prisoners of war in Gaza. Back in December 2023, Netanyahu himself acknowledged in a town hall with the family of the captives that Israeli prisoners had been “under our bombardments and our [military] activity there.”

Yet more admission from the Israeli press about the use of the Hannibal Directive on October 7.

If the Israeli leadership manages to kill the last remaining prisoners, Hamas will be left with no leverage in its negotiations with the Israelis and their western backers.

In such a scenario, the latest Hamas warning about the impending danger to the remaining Israeli prisoners in Gaza is unlikely to change the Zionist position. With an endless supply of bombs from the United States and the supposedly “civilised”western world fully backing the Israelis to see their ghastly mission to its genocidal end, the surviving Palestinians in Gaza have been left waiting for their turn at martyrdom.

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