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Gaza City: Hamas on Friday urged US President Donald Trump to meet with Palestinian prisoners freed during the ongoing truce in Gaza, following his meeting with released Israeli hostages the day before.
Just as he spoke of the “unbearable suffering” of Israeli hostages, the US president should “show the same level of respect to freed Palestinian political prisoners and allocate time to meet and listen to their stories,” senior Hamas leader Basem Naim wrote in an open letter addressed to Trump.
More than 9,500 Palestinian prisoners were currently being held in Israeli prisons, he said.
On Thursday, Trump met in the Oval Office with eight former Israeli hostages who were released as part of the truce agreement that took effect on January 19.
The first phase of the agreement led to the release of 33 hostages, including eight who were deceased, in exchange for about 1,800 Palestinian detainees.
In late November 2023, 105 hostages had already been freed during a one-week truce in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
Of the 251 people abducted during Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, 58 are still being held in Gaza, 34 of whom have been declared dead by the Israeli military.
Hamas’s attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 48,446 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The United Nations considers these figures reliable.