The leader of Lebanon's Hizbullah movement, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, accused Israel on Sunday of abandoning four of its citizens, believed to have been captured by his Shiite resistance group.
"The Israeli government doesn't care about the suffering of the families of the Israeli prisoners and is not prepared to free what would be a small number of Lebanese and Palestinians it is detaining, in exchange for information on the fate of the Israeli prisoners," Nasrallah said in a speech in Beirut's southern suburbs to mark the 9th anniversary of the kidnapping of a Hezbollah member, Mustapha Dirani, in an Israeli commando raid.
"We are not asking for the freeing of a large number of prisoners in exchange for the information we are ready to furnish ... and we are ready to conclude an overall accord in which the information and the exchange would be done at the same time," he added, according to AFP.
"But when we asked that the exchange include Palestinian prisoners detained by the Israelis, they responded through an intermediary that we could not obtain more than 250 Palestinians" and "that the Israelis reserved the right to choose them," he added. (Albawaba.com)
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