A senior Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip has criticized a cartoon posted on the website of the movement's armed wing that implied a captured Israeli soldier may die in its custody. Senior leader Mahmud al-Zahar said the video released Sunday, in which the captured soldier Gilad Shalit's father sees in a dream a flag-draped coffin, "does not express the official position of the Hamas movement."
"We have not and will not kill captive Israeli soldiers," he told reporters, according to AFP. "Our morals and our religion prevent us from doing that."
The three-minute three-dimensional cartoon made by Hamas' armed wing depicted Shalit's father visibly ageing as he walks through empty streets beneath billboards of past and future Israeli leaders vowing to free his son. In the end, he is shown receiving a coffin at the Gaza Strip border before waking up and realizing there is still hope for a prisoner exchange.
