World Feb. 16, 2009 - 04:13AM JST ( 4 )

JERUSALEM —

The release of captured soldier Gilad Shalit has become Israel’s top priority, even above the aims it set for its offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Sunday.

“In the first place (the liberation of) Gilad Shalit, secondly halting smuggling from Egypt to the Gaza Strip and thirdly a total ceasefire,” he told a conference of presidents of Jewish-American organizations.

A senior Hamas official, however, hinted that the soldier may have been killed during Israel’s war on the Islamist movement’s besieged Gaza enclave last month, along with some 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.

Olmert earlier on Sunday consulted Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and senior negotiator Amos Gilad on the Israeli stance in Egyptian-brokered Gaza truce talks.

The group planned to form a joint position to present to the security cabinet later this week, Olmert’s office said.

Israeli media reported that Olmert would also discuss the talks with right-wing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu—who is widely expected to form the next government following last week’s general elections.

Egypt has been struggling to broker a lasting truce between the two sides since the devastating three-week war in Gaza was ended by separate ceasefires on Jan 18 that have since been strained by tit-for-tat exchanges of fire.

Olmert said on Saturday that Israel would not agree to any truce without the release of Staff Sergeant Shalit, a conscript seized in a deadly cross-border raid by Hamas and two other militant groups in June 2006.

The prime minister reiterated the precondition on Sunday, adding: “We will not open the crossing points (between Gaza and Israel) before Shalit has returned home.”

Hamas has said the captured soldier is a separate matter to be resolved through a prisoner exchange for hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

Referring to that demand, Olmert said Israel is ready to “pay a lot for our people. It is perhaps our weakness or our strength.”

“Above everything, we want to see Shalit back home. We’ll look at the rest afterwards. If we obtain the return of Shalit and make the smuggling stop, I think we will have done our job,” he said.

Hamas has demanded that any truce deal include the full reopening of all Gaza’s border crossings, bringing an end to the blockade Israel imposed when the Islamist group seized Gaza in 2007.

Mussa Abu Marzuq, deputy head of Hamas’s Damascus-based politburo, suggested that Shalit could have died during the Gaza war.

“I don’t have enough information, but Shalit may have been among the children who died. But really, I don’t know,” he told the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat.

Then a 19-year-old corporal, Shalit was captured on June 25, 2006 by Hamas and other militants who tunneled under Gaza’s border with Israel and attacked an army post.

Egyptian security chief Omar Suleiman has been leading separate negotiations with Israel and Hamas, and said efforts were underway to draw up a list of Palestinian prisoners who might be released in exchange for the Israeli soldier.

The lawyer for Marwan Barghuti, who is revered by many Palestinians for having masterminded the second intifada, said on Sunday that his client’s release has never been closer.

“We have never been closer to an agreement for the release of Marwan Barghuthi,” lawyer Khader Shkirat told the privately run Channel 10 television. “It could come in the next few days.”

The television said that Barghuti, who was the West Bank leader of Fatah during the uprising that broke out in 2000 and is still seen as a leading candidate to take over from Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, had been told of his imminent release.

He is likely to be one of the first prisoners released in any exchange for Shalit as a goodwill gesture by Israel to Abbas, the television added.

Barghuti was detained in April 2003 and given five life sentences in June 2004 after being convicted of masterminding four attacks on Israeli targets.

Even though he is a key figure in Fatah and seen as the secular movement’s principal rival to Hamas in terms of public support, he figures high on the list of prisoners whose release the Islamists have demanded from Israel.

Last week, Israel held a general election in which right-wing parties—which have vowed tough action against Hamas in Gaza—made major gains, casting further doubt on the truce talks.

Wire reports