 |
| Palestinians demonstrate yesterday on the Mount of Olives, which overlooks the Dome of the Rock in the Al Aqsa mosque compound, as they protest against the Jewish settlers who live in Arab East Jerusalem’s a-Tur neighbourhood and against a decision by the Jerusalem municipality and Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority to build a national park on Palestinian land in a-Tur and Issawiya |
Hamas would consider any Palestinian peace deal with Israel as a truce, the Islamist movement’s second-in-command Moussa Abu Marzuk said in a rare interview with American Jewish daily Forward.
“We will not recognise Israel as a state,” he reiterated during an interview conducted over two days in Cairo, where he has lived since leaving Damascus along with most of the Hamas leadership in exile.
Abu Marzuk stressed that while under the reconciliation agreement with Fatah leader and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas did not object to the rival Palestinian faction negotiating with Israel, his movement’s position remained that any deal must be put to a referendum of all Palestinians, including refugees.
“When we reach the agreement, our point of view is, it’s a hudna” or truce, Abu Marzuk, the deputy director of Hamas’ political bureau, told the Forward.
After Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, who opposed it, made many changes, he noted.
“Let’s establish a relationship between the two states in the historic Palestinian land as a hudna between both sides,” added the leader of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip that remains under Israeli blockade.
“It’s better than war and better than the continuous resistance against the occupation. And better than Israel occupying the West Bank and Gaza, making all these difficulties and problems on both sides,” he argued.
Abu Marzuk did not exclude that his position on recognising Israel could be “completely different” in “10 years”.
Hamas is currently renewing its advisory council (Majlis al-Shura), which will select the movement’s political bureau.
Part of the Hamas leadership, particularly in Gaza, accuses the political bureau chief Khalid Mishal of having agreed to too many concessions toward reconciliation, declaring that he would “give a chance” to negotiations with Israel.
l An 18-year-old Palestinian shepherd was seriously wounded by Israeli gunfire in the northern West Bank, Palestinian security sources said yesterday.
Yasser Kaabneh, 18, was tending his sheep north of Tubas in the Jordan Valley on Thursday night when he received a bullet wound to the chest, the sources said, adding the area was regularly used by the Israeli army for training.
Kaabneh was in serious condition and transported to a hospital in Nablus, they added.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said: “No complaint has been filed with the competent military authorities.
“We have no knowledge of any such incident, and no accidents were reported during training in the area on Thursday.”