A senior Hamas official, Moussa Abou Marzouk, visiting Moscow, said on Saturday that the Palestinian movement was trying to determine the location of eight hostages with dual Russian and Israeli nationality so they could be freed.
“We are now looking for the people who have been reported by the Russian side. It is difficult, but we are looking. And as soon as we find them, we will release them,” the official said, quoted by the Russian news agency, Ria Novosti.
He explained that he had received from the Russian Foreign Ministry a list of eight names of citizens with dual Russian-Israeli nationality who would be detained in the Gaza Strip.
“We are very attentive to this list and we will treat it carefully because we consider Russia our closest friend,” Moussa Abou Marzouk said. The Hamas leader arrived in Moscow on Thursday for talks, the first since the start of the conflict with Israel almost three weeks ago.
These discussions included the release of hostages and the evacuation of Russian citizens. On Tuesday, the Kremlin indicated that no progress had been made in freeing the Russian hostages held by Hamas, and even admitted that it did not know how many there were.
Hundreds of Russian citizens also live in the Gaza Strip, a target of Israeli bombing. Russia, unlike the United States, does not consider Hamas a terrorist organization and has always maintained relations with the Palestinian Islamist movement.
If Moscow condemned the attacks launched on October 7 against Israeli civilians, it also insisted on the need for a Palestinian state to end the conflict and warned Israel against the consequences of a blind and murderous response.
