Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal invited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to Gaza for unconditional talks on the two factions' divisions and renewed an offer to Israel to strike only military targets, in a television interview Monday. He also told British broadcaster Sky News that Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, captured by Palestinian militants in June 2006, is still alive and being treated well. “We invite Mr Mahmoud Abbas to come to Gaza to talk directly without any conditions... to work together to find a solution to the problems in Gaza and the West Bank,” Meshaal said, speaking from an undisclosed location in Damascus. The aim of the talks would be “get back our Palestinian union and find the reasons for our problems and to solve the security problem,” he added. The invitation comes after rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Abbas's Fatah reached a Yemeni-brokered deal on March 23 to open their first direct talks since the Islamists seized control of the Gaza Strip nine months ago. But within hours of signing that agreement, the two bitter rivals bickered over its meaning, with Hamas focusing on the first part of the statement while Fatah highlighted the second as a precondition for any talks. And the day after the deal was struck, a senior Israeli official warned Abbas against striking a reconciliation deal with Hamas, saying it would effectively sink faltering Middle East peace talks. The Hamas seizure of Gaza effectively split the Palestinian territories into two separate entities with Hamas controlling the impoverished coastal strip and Abbas ruling the occupied West Bank. On Shalit, Meshaal said: “Gilad is still alive and we are treating him in a good way while the Israelis treat our prisoners badly and everyone knows that.” Shalit was seized on June 25, 2006 from an army base near Gaza by militants from three groups including Hamas. Last April, Hamas sent to Israel, through Egypt, a list of 450 prisoners it wanted freed in exchange for Shalit. But an Israeli official said at the time that many of the Palestinian prisoners had “blood on their hands,” meaning they had been involved in attacks that killed Israelis, and could not be released. A senior Hamas leader, Mahmud Al-Zahar, warned earlier this month that Shalit would only be released if all of the group's demands were met. Also in the interview, Meshaal said Israel was the “problem” in reaching a deal to “let the civilian people from the two sides be free from our conflict.” He described rocket attacks into Israel as “an ordinary reaction towards the Israeli occupation” and said that while Hamas did not deny the Holocaust, “we believe the Zionists have exaggerated the numbers to get sympathy from other nations.” On the proposed deal with Israel, Meshaal said he was renewing an offer first made 10 years ago. “We renew our offer to Israel to let the civilians on both sides not be a part of this conflict,” he said, adding that if Israel agreed not to kill Palestinian civilians, Hamas would only attack Israeli military targets. “We renew this offer today,” he told the broadcaster in an undisclosed location in Damascus, where he lives in exile. Mashaal said that Israel exaggerates the Palestinian militant group's military strength, accusing the Jewish state of seeking to spark a war against Hamas and Hezbollah. “Hamas' military capacity is humble, but the enemy is exaggerating it in an attempt to justify its aggression and justify more aggression and more brutality,” Mashaal told the Associated Press in an interview Sunday at his office in Damascus. “Our weapons are humble but we have great will. This is what makes our action effective,” he said. __
