Martin Chulov, Middle East correspondent | July 19, 2008
HAMAS has pledged to heed lessons from Israel's prisoner swap with Hezbollah by demanding a higher price for captured soldier Gilad Shalit, held in the Gaza Strip.
The militant regime, which rules Gaza, has said Israel had shown it was no longer able to dictate terms during negotiations, and immediately moved to set its own terms on protracted talks about Shalit's release.
Israeli officials have spent days trying to downplay the aftermath of the swap, in which many commentators on both sides of the Lebanese border have claimed Israeli leaders did poorly.
After three days of celebrations throughout central and southern Lebanon, Hezbollah will this weekend rebury the 19 slain soldiers exhumed from Israel and returned as part of the deal.
Hamas negotiators in Gaza, meanwhile, were demanding that the same German negotiator who brokered the Hezbollah-Israel deal also play a role in floundering talks about a trade for Shalit.
A truce in Gaza between the enemies is continuing to hold despite some infringements on both sides. However, Hamas is insisting it will not move to advance talks about Shalit until Israel honours a pledge to reopen the border with Egypt and agrees to free up to 1000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
Both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas claim about 11,550 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons. The latter has demanded that at least 10 per cent of prisoners be freed, among them militants who have been convicted of terror offences.
"We want a just and fair deal," the group's leader in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, told Israeli media. "If we remain firm, we will be able to achieve our goals. We can achieve victory over this enemy.
"This deal gives us a chance to ask for more," he continued. "I can't say that we will up our demands today, but we will certainly not accept anything less than what we have asked for."
A final prisoner deal in Gaza has almost been brokered twice in the past few months, but both sides have baulked before signing.
Israeli officials had been preoccupied with pushing through the deal with Hezbollah and learning the fate of the two captured soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, both of whom were returned to their families in coffins after two years of silence about their fate.
The soldiers had apparently died at the time of their abduction or shortly afterwards, however intensive efforts by Israel had been unable to uncover any news about their condition.
Shalit, however, is known to be alive and an impetus to return him intact has increased in Israeli society, which is unaccustomed to the perception that it has lost ground to an enemy.
"Truly, it won't be easy," said Israeli President Shimon Peres of upcoming negotiations. "But we have done it in the past because we want all of our sons and daughters home, alive or dead."
Tel Aviv University's professor of Middle Eastern and North African studies, Eyal Zisser, believes Hezbollah and Hamas will soon be forced to set aside celebrations.
"It's not like this propaganda victory actually changed anything," he said. "The reality is the same on the ground as it was before the soldiers were returned.
"Everybody will forget about propaganda victories tomorrow and concentrate on what's been achieved.
"The northern border has been very quiet since the end of the war and this is because (Hezbollah) do not want to risk another round.
"Lebanon has not yet recovered from the war. It paid a terrible toll after Hezbollah flared things up last time, and it remains unlikely that there will be another clash."
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