US releases Khaled Meshaal’s half-brother amid Gaza ceasefire talks

The half-brother of senior Hamas official Khaled Mashal has been released from a federal prison in the US state of Texas, amid ongoing negotiations between Hamas and Israel on the release of Israeli captives in the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli media said Mofid Abdul Qadir Meshaal, who had been sentenced in 2009 to 20 years in prison for financing Hamas, was released early due to “good behavior.”

The Israeli regime’s Channel 13 said the release could be attributed to “progress” in the talks on the Israeli captives held in Gaza since October last year.

The Hamas-led resistance groups in the besieged territory captured more than 230 Israelis on October 7, 2023, in a historic operation that was staged in retaliation for the regime’s decades-long deadly aggression against Palestinians.

The regime brought the entire Gaza under a war of genocide afterward. The brutal military onslaught has so far claimed the lives of some 45,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to sustain the onslaught until Hamas’ “elimination,” a prospect that has been ruled out as impossible by the group and even some Israeli officials and Tel Aviv’s own allies.

Hamas announced last week that the death toll among the captives had risen to 33 as a result of intense Israeli attacks against the territory.

The resistance group said the deaths had been caused and some other captives had gone missing “because of the criminal Netanyahu and his fascist army.”

Zionist captive to Netanyahu: We die a thousand times every day

Zionist captive denounces the Israeli prime minister for his insistence on refusing to bring an end to Tel Aviv’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.

Hamas and Israel have held several rounds of negotiations brokered by Qatar, Egypt and the US regarding the exchange of Israeli captives with Palestinian prisoners on condition of the regime’s end to its genocidal war following a binding ceasefire and withdrawal of the occupation forces from the Gaza Strip, but the talks have failed to yield any tangible results.

A senior Arab diplomat familiar with the negotiations told The Times of Israel that the two sides had yet to compromise on the main issues.

According to the unnamed diplomat, there appears to be “indications” that the sides are willing to show flexibility regarding the terms of the regime’s withdrawal from Gaza, particularly from the Philadelphi and Netzarim Corridors that border and bisect the Gaza Strip respectively.

Netanyahu added new conditions in July demanding that Israel remain on those routes indefinitely, in what the diplomat said significantly hampered talks that were then on the verge of a breakthrough.

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is set to travel to the occupied territories as optimism about the chances for a deal after over a year of impasses began picking up.

Israeli minister for military affairs Israel Katz told his American counterpart Lloyd Austin in a call earlier Wednesday that Tel Aviv had identified a “real possibility” to secure a deal that would release all remaining captives.

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