GAZA CITY, Gaza City (AP) — A senior Hamas official told supporters at a Gaza City rally on Thursday that the war with Israel won’t be over until the group’s demands for a lifting of the Gaza blockade are met, insisting that its fighters would never give up their arms.
“Our fingers are on the trigger and our rockets are trained at Tel Aviv,” the official, Mushir al-Masri said, as Egypt struggled to broker a lasting truce between Israel and Hamas, with an Egyptian official saying that Gaza-based militants were refusing to compromise.
Cairo is mediating indirect talks between Israel and Hamas on extending a 72-hour cease-fire that expires Friday morning. Hamas has demanded the lifting of an Israeli and Egyptian blockade imposed on the coastal territory after the Islamic militant group seized power in 2007.
Israel has said the militants must disarm first, which al-Masri insisted was out of the question.
“The war is not over yet. Our men are still in the field, manning forward positions, our fingers are on the trigger, and our rockets are trained on Tel Aviv, and Lod and beyond,” he told several thousand supporters in the first mass rally since the fighting began on July 8.
“It is out of the question that the weapons of the resistance should be on the negotiating table. They have not been put on the table, and God willing, they will never be.”
Al-Masri insisted fighters are “in good shape” despite the nearly monthlong war and still had tunnels extending into Israel that could be used for attacks if Hamas’ demands are not met.
The Egyptian security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said the Palestinian delegation’s stance had hardened after the arrival in Cairo of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders from the Gaza Strip.
He said Azzam al-Ahmad, the leader of the delegation and the representative of Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, had threatened to withdraw from the talks if the two militant groups do not show more “flexibility,” adding that the delegation, which was supposed to leave Cairo on Thursday, would stay through the weekend.
Palestinian delegates could not immediately be reached for comment.
The war stemmed from the killing of three Israeli teens in the West Bank in June. Israel blamed the killings on Hamas and launched a massive arrest campaign, rounding up hundreds of its members in the West Bank, as Hamas and other militants stepped up rocket fire from Gaza.
On July 8 Israel launched a massive air assault on the territory and nine days later it sent in ground troops it said would target rocket launchers and cross-border tunnels built by Hamas for attacks inside Israel.
Nearly 1,900 Palestinians have been killed in the fighting, three-quarters of them civilians, according to the United Nations. Israel says some 900 Palestinian militants were among the dead. Sixty-four Israeli soldiers and three civilians inside Israel have also been killed.
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Michael reported from Cairo.
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Ummm, according to my reading, Hamas won the election, and only started fighting after Fatah refused to recognize their victory. It may be a semantic difference, and was certainly a disaster for the Palestinians in Gaza, but saying they “seized power” is equivalent of saying Obama “seized power” in 2008.
Second, why can’t Israel use ground-penetrating radar and seismic mapping to locate and shut down the tunnels?
This sounds awfully familiar. Bush gave an ultimatum to Saddam to disarm or we will attack you. Saddam disarmed (or was already disarmed when Bush made the threat), then Bush attacked an unarmed country.
The moral is to never disarm. After all, how many Americans have given up their guns?
As brutally disproportionate, savage, and, indeed, self-defeating as Israel’s Gaza attack and entire territories policy has been for at least 30 years, people need to avoid falling for Hamas’s own propaganda. This is not a group bravely fighting for the betterment of Gaza’s people. It is a vile hate group committed to violence, and caring little about the deaths of its own people.
Consider this charming quote just days ago from Hamas’s official spokesman: “We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians, in order to mix their blood in their holy matzos. This is not a figment of imagination or something taken from a film. It is a fact, acknowledged by their own books and by historical evidence. It happened everywhere, here and there.” When challenged on this by Wolf Blitzer, the spokesman stood firmly by it.
Consider also the Hamas charter, which not only dismisses any peace option and vows warfare until Israel ceases to exist, but also declares that the true struggle cannot be won until all Jews worldwide are dead.
As Paul Waldman well said it recently, “we can hold in our minds two thoughts that seem incompatible only to the most morally simpleminded: Both that Hamas is monstrous for putting rockets near places where hundreds of people are huddling to escape the fighting, and that Israel is wrong for taking the bait and bombing the school or hospital anyway.”
Hamas is the Black Knight in a Monty Python skit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKhEw7nD9C4This is a direct falsehood. Chapter 21 of the Hamas Charter specifically talks about Jews living peacefully as citizens of their eventual Islamic state. This is clear, direct and unequivocal.
Hamas regards the establishment of Israel by the European powers as illegal, and believe the principles of Zionism, a state created exclusively for a particular nationality, to be racist. What they want to “destroy” is that government they regard as illegal. (This is also true for Iran and other Arab countries hostile to the government of Israel).
The part in the charter about killing every last jew is a reference to in battles and stems from a rather silly quote from the Qoran about which trees shelter Jews and which ones will reveal them. The author (killed by Israel a long time ago) was trying to say that G_d is on Hamas side and victory was assured, but between the translation and the author’s lack of skill, the meaning is quite garbled and subject to malicious misquoting by Hasbara sources. The government of Israel has been making hay off his poor syntax for well over a decade.