JERUSALEM - Islamist group Hamas offered Israel a 30-year truce in 1997 but it was overtaken by a botched assassination attempt against its now leader, Khaled Meshaal, a former spy chief is reportedly to reveal in upcoming memoirs.
Efraim Halevy, who headed Israel's Mossad foreign intelligence service, makes the revelation in his book "Man in the Shadows" which is to come out in Britain on April 4, the Haaretz daily reported.
Halevy says the offer was conveyed to a Mossad representative by Jordan's King Hussein who then felt "severely betrayed" when Mossad agents tried to kill Meshaal in Amman by drizzling poison in his ear before the offer had even been conveyed to then premier Benjamin Netanyahu, the daily said.
Halevy recounts that it was his idea to offer the release of the since-assassinated Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin to placate the king, whose security forces arrested two of the agents and besieged the rest in the Israeli embassy, one of the paper's star correpondents Zeev Schiff wrote.
"Relations with Amman deteriorated so badly that the king mulled demanding at a press conference that Israel turn in the Mossad agents who had fled to the embassy. If Israel did not turn them in, Hussein was seriously considering military action.
"Halevy thought otherwise. He suggested releasing Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from an Israeli prison and transferring him to Jordan, where King Hussein would then order him returned to the Gaza Strip.
"Opposition was fierce in the intelligence agencies and the Israeli Defence Forces. Support for Halevy's idea came mostly from then-defence minister Yitzhak Mordechai, and it was ultimately approved by Netanyahu."
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