Analysis: Hamas steals Abbas thunder with prisoner deal

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Hamas has jumped back into the Middle East spotlight with a prisoner swap deal with Israel that will score points over President Mahmoud Abbas and steal some of the thunder he generated by pushing for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.
But the deal hailed by the Islamist group which governs Gaza as a national victory was dimmed by Israel's refusal to free some prominent prisoners from rival factions, chief among them Marwan Barghouti -- a leading figure in Abbas' Fatah movement.

Hamas had repeatedly pledged to secure Barghouti's release in any deal to set free Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured in 2006. Israel is now set to free more than 1,000 Palestinians for Shalit in the deal announced on Tuesday.
"They would have given up on an important person in Barghouti. Someone important to the national movement," said Hany al-Masri, a political commentator based in Ramallah in the West Bank. "It's still a victory, but not such a great one."
The exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, announcing the deal from his Damascus headquarters, said the prisoners included more than 300 serving life terms in Israeli jails. They were drawn from members of all the Palestinian factions.
But he did not name any of them, fuelling early speculation that Barghouti and Ahmed Saadat, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation Of Palestine, had been left out of the deal.
Meshaal described the lopsided swap as "a national achievement" for the Palestinians, whose struggle for statehood has been crippled by the divide between the Hamas-run Gaza Strip and Abbas' West Bank-based Palestinian Authority.