A spokesman for the military wing of the “Hamas” movement, “Al-Qassam Brigades,” Abu Obeida, announced a deterioration in the health of one of the enemy prisoners. “We will publish in the coming hours, God willing, what confirms this,” the spokesman added.
This came after the head of the Hamas political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, said during his stay in Lebanon that the resistance in Gaza has four Israeli prisoners, “two of whom the occupation knows nothing about.”
Hamas captured two soldiers in 2014, Shaul Aron and Hadar Goldin. As for the two prisoners, Avira Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, they entered Gaza under unclear circumstances.
And the prisoner Shaul Aron, who was captured by the resistance during an operation carried out east of Al-Tuffah neighborhood in eastern Gaza against the occupation army, on July 20, 2014, which resulted in the killing of 14 Israeli soldiers. Al-Qassam for his family. Since his capture until now, Hamas has not provided any information about him.
As for the prisoner Hadar Golden, the son of the cousin of the former Israeli Minister of Defense, Moshe Ya’alon, he was captured during the aggression on Gaza in 2014. The movement did not announce his capture until after the war ended.
The third prisoner is Avira Mengistu, who crossed the fence separating the occupied territories and the northern Gaza Strip, on September 7, 2014, and since then its traces have disappeared. His family says that he is mentally disturbed, and in March 2013 he was released from military service for this reason. His family also accused the Israeli government several times of deliberately neglecting their son, and of not demanding his return for racist reasons, as he is black and of Ethiopian origin. This was confirmed by Al-Qassam in July 2019 by saying that Israel did not demand the return of Mengistu, through the mediators who spoke to it about the detainees.
The fourth captive is Hisham al-Sayed, a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship. According to the Israeli account, al-Sayed entered the Gaza Strip on April 20, 2015, through a gap in the fence separating Israel and the northern Gaza Strip, without knowing anything about his fate since then.