Mahmoud Abbas: No Peace Until Israel Releases Political Prisoners

International Middle East Media Center:

MECCA, December 10, 2008 - On Tuesday, President Mahmoud Abbas stated that there will be no Peace with Israel unless Israel releases all Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons, and that Israel must put an end to settler aggressions against Palestinian citizens, WAFA News Agency reported.

President Mahmoud Abbas asserted that the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons must be released, saying that this is one of the fundamental Final Status issues. He stressed that there will be 'no peace without freedom to all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons,' adding that the 11,000 prisoners suffering behind Israeli bars must be released, and that a number of them are to be released very soon.

Read the whole story: International Middle East Media Center

Comments

[SuperSam]

The late Tommy Lapid, justice minister in Ariel Sharon's government, caused an uproar in 2004 when he said that images of an elderly Palestinian woman in Gaza "crouching on all fours, searching for her medicines in the ruins of her house" demolished by the Is-ra.eli army reminded him of his own grandmother who perished at Auschwitz. Lapid compared the Is-ra.eli army's writing of numbers on the arms and foreheads of Palestinian prisoners to the Nazi practice of tattooing concentration camp inmates. "As a refugee from the Holocaust I find such an act insufferable," he said in 2002.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10013.shtml

[GZLives]

Regardless of what Mahmoud Abbas says for public consumption
there can be no peace until the Islamist Hamas is neutralized since they represent close to the majority of Palestinian Arabs, and they have rejected ANY and ALL recognition or co existence with Israel. There is no compromise and no negotiation and complete rejection by this group who was elected by a majority of Arabs so Abbas' statement is merely a way to continue to direct the frustration many who do want peace feel. the short term solution as always is to blame Israel for the lack of any progress.

If Israel pulls out of the West Bank, Hamas will take it and push Abbas' Fatah out.

130 rockets were fired into Israeli cities last week from Gaza ....

[chaos4700]

How many casualties? On both sides? How many Israelis died last week in armed conflict, versus how many Palestinians?

How about the fact that you're completely ignoring that Israel has thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in a kangaroo-court legal system? You keep apologizing for Israel and condemning the Palestinians, and you keep painting a picture that makes one side look like an irrational extremist by cherry-picking your facts. Which only makes you out to be the irrational extremist.

[GZLives]

I keep apologizing?

No , I keep raising an issue no one here EVER wants to talk about.
Half the Palestinians elected an organization that currently rules them in Gaza and that that publicly rejects the very idea of Israel much less peace with the Jews under ANY circumstances EVER.

That's simply a fact.
Not an apology, or a lie, or an excuse but a FACT.

And here's another fact
There will never be any peace until this organization is eliminated or moderates its views which Islamist groups by their very nature cannot and will not ever do. It would be an act of apostasy and would call for the death of whoever supported peace with a non Muslim.

This may be an uncomfortable fact for you to accept, but there's just no denying it.

[SuperSam]

GZLies is a Z.10nist soldier as someone named him earlier.