Mengistu is believed to have climbed last September over the security fence between Israel and Gaza.
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Following the conversation’s publication, Netanyahu said Lotan “should not have said these things” and invited the family to a meeting at his residence.
Negotiations for the hostages were also not expected to be part of any agreement with Hamas for the return of the bodies of IDF soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, who were both killed during last year’s 50-day war between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group, according to Israeli officials.
After visiting the family of captive Avraham Mengistu today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We face a very cynical and cruel enemy that denies the basic humanitarian obligation to send innocent citizens back to their country”. “They must be released based on this”.
Israel strove to keep the pair’s plight secret to the extent that then foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman and members of the parliamentary defence and foreign affairs committee said they had been kept totally unaware.
[Avraham] Mengistu and a second captive Israeli, a Bedouin who crossed into the Strip, constitute significant assets for Gaza’s Islamist rulers.
Mengistu owns by Israel’s 135,000-strong cultural Ethiopian society that will says it gets racism and prejudice.
“If we aren’t together, we will make mistakes and Hamas will translate them into another year or another price”, he said.
The father of an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas and released on a prisoner swap in 2011 said that his family received similar degrading treatment by the Israeli government directly after their son was lost.
Israeli media condemned the comments as patronising and insensitive.
Writing in Maariv, commentator Eitan Haber, an adviser to late premier Yitzhak Rabin, said Netanyahu was anxious to avoid a reprise of the Shalit affair, which saw public opinion sharply divided for and against the mass release. The family criticized Netanyahu’s failure to respond to their letters.
However, he said “nothing is for free”, speaking on condition of anonymity.
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Hamas has not been clear about whether it was holding the Israeli and has not made any demands for his release.
