Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that he was using his “personal ties” with Russian President Vladimir Putin to secure a prisoner swap contract with Syria that would see an Israeli woman released from a Syrian arrest as a reward for two Druze prisoners from the Israeli side of the Golan Heights.
“I am using my personal connections with President Putin to solve the problem. We are in the midst of sensitive connectors,” Netanyahu told Radio Cymru. “We are working meticulously and cautiously to address the issue, and I believe we will resolve it.”
National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat and Yaron Blum, the official in the Prime Minister’s Office with responsibility for Israeli detainees, have flown to Moscow to discuss the conditions of Israeli woman deportation.
Foreign media reported that the woman lived in an ultra-orthodox settlement of Modi’in Illit in the West Bank.
Syrian state news agency SANA reported earlier Wednesday that Damascus was indeed in prisoner-to-prison talks with Israel.
According to SANA, “children of the Syrian Golan in possession” will be released from Israeli prison in exchange for the Israeli woman detained after an unprovoked entry into the Syrian province of Quneitra.
SANA named the two prisoners from the Golan as Nihal al-Makt and Diab Kahamuz.
In his interview with Radio Radio, Netanyahu refused to confirm their identities.
He was released in a prisoner exchange last year, also mediated by Russia, which came after Syria returned the remains of Zachary Baumel, an Israeli soldier killed in battle during the 1982 Lebanon War.
“As part of the state’s effort to release its citizens from Israeli prisons in any way and at any cost, an effort is being made to free Syrian citizens from Israeli prison-owned Golan in Israel,” he said. Syrian report.
Earlier Wednesday, the Palestinian Prisoners Club said the Israeli Prison Service had notified Kahamuz of his news as part of an agreement with Syria.
The group also said, however, that Kahamuz did not want to be deported to Syria and instead wanted to return to his home in the small town of Ghajar.
Al-Makt was sentenced last year to three years in prison for hard labor after being arrested in 2017. Her brother was the longest-serving prisoner in Israeli prisons after nearly 30 years spent there.
“I am free in my country without unconditional bonds and without authority (Israel) over me,” she told Syrian Al-Ikhbariya TV, speaking via Skype after the exchange.
Officials were confident that, despite the refusal, the agreement would be pushed through.
The SANA report came a day after Netanyahu called a secret meeting, an emergency cabinet that was said to be related to a sensitive security issue involving Syria and Russia.
The details of the meeting were strictly curated and some ministers were told it would be about the treatment of pandemic coronavirus infection.
There has recently been high-level communication between Moscow and Jerusalem.
Israel’s ambassador to Russia, Alexander Ben Zvi, recently met with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov and Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu.
Last week, Netanyahu spoke to Putin, while Defense Minister Benny Gantz spoke to his Kremlin group.
Gantz’s office said the two “agree that humanitarian measures must be taken in the area.”