GAZA, Jul. 11, 2010 (Xinhua News Agency) -- The Islamic Hamas movement on Sunday said it welcomes new mediators to help conclude a prisoner swap deal with Israel though it was not informed that the mediator could be former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
"We were not told that Clinton would be mediating, but we welcome any role to accomplish the swap, either it was U.S. or German or others," Salah Al-Bardawil, a Hamas spokesman told Xinhua.
Earlier on Sunday, Maan news, a local Palestinian agency, reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had invited Clinton to travel to Gaza and discuss with Hamas leaders to release Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held hostage in Gaza, in exchange for a number of prisoners.
Al-Bardawil said that Hamas wants Israel to free as many as 1, 000 prisoners "without vetoes or conditions on any prisoner."
Germany led several rounds of discussions between Hamas and Israel in late 2009 but failed to broker a deal because Hamas presented a list of 450 names and insisted that Israel free them, while the Jewish state wanted to expel and remove some of the names from the list.
Hamas, labelled a terrorist group by the United States, captured Shalit in a cross-border raid near Gaza in 2006, and Israel holds up to 8,000 Palestinian and Arab people in its jails.
