Ex-hostage to PM: Hamas chief told me I would be released first in deal since my father didn’t go to protests

During one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meetings with freed hostages at Beilinson Hospital today, former captive Eitan Mor told the premier that during his captivity in Gaza, a Hamas leader told him that he would have a better chance of being freed because his family had not taken part in protests pressuring the government to reach a hostage-ceasefire deal, the Prime Minister’s Office tells The Times of Israel, confirming a Ynet report.

According to the report, Mor told the premier that Izz al-Din al-Haddad — who previously commanded Hamas’s Gaza City Brigade and serves as the terror group’s de facto leader in the Strip — told him during captivity: “If anyone is going to be released first, it’s you. Your father doesn’t go out to protests anyway, so we’ll send you back first.”

Mor’s father, Zvika, heads the Tikva Forum, a smaller group of hostage families who — unlike members of the larger Hostages and Missing Families Forum — have opposed earlier deals that secured the release of only some hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners and temporary ceasefires in Gaza.

Mor was freed on Monday, along with the 19 other remaining living hostages in Gaza.