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Freed Israeli captive calls on Israel gov’t to reach a deal
Qaid Farhan al-Kadi, an Israeli man who was abducted by Hamas on October 7 and held in Gaza until he was recovered earlier this week, has returned to his home and called on the Israeli government to reach a deal for the release of the remaining captives.
“It does not matter if they are Arab or Jewish, all have a family waiting for them. They also want to feel the joy,” he told reporters in his home village of Khirbet Karkur. “I told Netanyahu yesterday, ‘work to have an end to this’.”
The 52-year-old is one of Israel’s about 300,000 Arab Bedouins, a group that has long faced discrimination from the Israeli state.
The Associated Press reported that Khirbet Karkur, an unincorporated Bedouin village, is currently under demolition orders by the government.
Since November, 70 percent of residents have received notifications that their homes will be demolished on the grounds that they were constructed without permits, which Israeli authorities rarely grant to the group. About one-third of Bedouin Arabs live in communities and villages that the Israeli government considers illegal.
Israeli captives’ families march for deal
Many families of Israeli captives have set out on a march from Tel Aviv towards an area near the security fence with Gaza to demand a prisoner exchange deal.
Shira Albag, the mother of one of the female soldiers held in the Strip, said history would care more about how the country manages the safe return of captives than whether Israel occupied the Philadelphi Corridor.
Her comments come after another round of ceasefire talks in Cairo on Sunday failed to yield any results as Hamas rejected new conditions put forward by Israel.
Key sticking points in the talks include an Israeli presence in the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow 14.5km (9-mile) stretch of land along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.
In Cairo, the Hamas delegation demanded that Israel be bound by what was agreed upon on July 2, following a plan laid out by Biden and a UNSC resolution.
