From the Liveblog of
Monday, September 21, 2026
Former PA minister who said he mediated between Israel and Hamas before Oct. 7 reveals new details of talks
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A former Palestinian Authority minister who revealed on Friday that he had served as a mediator between Israel and Hamas for roughly a year and a half before the October 7, 2023, attack, says in a new Facebook post that he mediated the talks at the request of senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad.
According to Abu Zaida, a Fatah member who served as the PA’s minister for prisoner affairs from 2005 to 2006, Hamad approached him in March 2022 to ask him if he would consider intervening in Hamas’s negotiations with Israel, saying that they had been stalled for years.
Specifically, Abu Zaida says Hamad wanted him to negotiate the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel in exchange for the two Israeli civilians that Hamas held at the time — Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed — and the bodies of IDF soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul.
He says that Hamad confirmed that then-Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had approved his plan to approach Abu Zaida about mediating talks.
Abu Zaida, a proponent of the two-state solution who was involved in the Oslo Accords process, defends his decision to accept Hamad’s request and serve as an intermediary with Israel, saying he did it “neither for the sake of Hamas nor for specific individuals,” but “for the sake of Gaza and its people.”
He says he hoped that the negotiations would “secure the release of prisoners, resolve the electricity crisis, facilitate reconstruction, allow workers to enter, address infrastructure destroyed years ago, and lift the Israeli ban on the entry of hundreds of essential items needed by the population.”
It is unclear from Abu Zaida’s post whether the negotiations were still ongoing when Hamas launched its attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, sparking the two-year war in the Gaza Strip and thereby drastically worsening the conditions of the enclave for its roughly 2.3 million residents.
The former PA minister said on Friday that he will soon reveal details of those talks, including a message that he passed to Israel from Sinwar.
The Times of Israel Community.