"Clandestine and advanced negotiations are taking place to free the kidnapped soldiers," said Zvi Regev, father of Eldad, who is being held hostage together with Ehud Goldwasser by Hizbullah.
The comments were made at a solidarity rally with family members of the abducted soldiers held in Kiryat Motzkin along with 400 school children to mark 500 days since Corporal Gilad Shalit was abducted by Palestinian terrorists in a cross-border raid from Gaza.
Shalit's parents were absent from the rally, but the representatives from the Goldwasser and Regev families were in attendence. In a conversation with Ynet, Zvi, Eldad's father, said: "Negotiations are going on all the time. The German negotiator is traveling back and forth from Lebanon and speaking with Hizbullah. Unfortunately, there is still no success, and no kind of credible information on the fate of our sons."
For a number of months, no new information has been received on Shalit. A spokesman of one of the organizations holding him told Ynet that no progress has been made in almost six months. "It seems the Israelis want us to kidnap more soldiers so that things move," the spokesman said, warning: "The Israelis can forget about dreams of freeing Shalit by force."
The same spokesman, who goes by the name of Abu Mujaha, said: "The last offer brought by the Egyptian negotiator from the Israeli side – and it did contain enough for progress – was releasing a thousand prisoners.
"Despite the number steps were taken to prepare the deal and we sent, via the Egyptian negotiator, a list of 330 names to the Israeli side, who were supposed to be released in the first stage. But after four days
the Egyptians told s that Israel approved only 30 our of the 330 names we demanded. From here we stopped contacts, because we understood that the Israelis have no intention of serious negotiations, and they only want to play for time."
Ali Waked contributed to this report