A spokesman for the Hamas movement’s armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, in Gaza yesterday showed pictures of four Israeli soldiers, said to be missing in the Gaza Strip since 2014.
Abu Obeida, spokesman for the group, said in a statement on the official Hamas-run television channel al-Aqsa TV that the group isn’t in contact with Israel about the missing soldiers.
Covering his face with a red scarf and wearing a military uniform, he spoke in Arabic with a poster behind him featuring black-and-white photos of the four Israeli soldiers.
In the summer of 2014, Israel waged a large-scale military operation on the Gaza Strip that lasted for 50 days. The offensive left 2,200 Palestinians and 70 Israelis killed, while four Israeli soldiers went missing.
“There is no contact with the occupation in relation to the missing soldiers in Gaza and we won’t give free information,” said the spokesman, referring to Israel as the occupation.
“(Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu lied to his people when he spoke about his prisoners,” he added.
Israel has repeatedly announced that the soldiers were killed during the military operation in 2014 and asked Hamas to bring their corpses back to their home country.
Hamas didn’t say whether the four Israeli soldiers are dead of alive.
In 2010, Egypt brokered a prisoner swap deal between Israel and Hamas, in which Israel released 1,028 male and female prisoners for the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured by Gaza resistance fighters in 2006.
Meanwhile, the Hamas group has lashed out at Twitter, after the social media giant allegedly closed a number of its accounts.
The Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades said its English and Arabic-language accounts had been closed for the third time in two weeks.
One of the closed accounts had more than 140,000 followers, it said in a statement.
Al-Qassam accused Twitter of showing a “clear bias to the Israeli occupation where it should (adopt a) neutral position toward both sides".
It said that Israeli officials were allowed to encourage “racism, extremism and terrorism” on the site, and called on the company to reopen the accounts.
Twitter said in a statement that it does not comment on individual accounts for “privacy and security reasons".
Hamas, along with other Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza, has fought three wars with Israel since 2008.
During the most recent of those conflicts, in 2014, Twitter closed down most of Hamas’s accounts.