PLO rejects US pressure on Hamas to disarm, denies Hamas terrorism

A senior member of the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah party denounces US demands that Hamas disarm, denies that Hamas is a terrorist organization.

By World Israel News Staff

A senior Palestinian Authority official denounced American demands that Hamas be disarmed as a condition for implementing the second phase of the Trump administration’s 20-point Gaza plan and denied that the Islamist group engages in terrorism.

On Monday, the Egypt-based Shorouk News published an interview with Azzam al-Ahmad, a senior member of the PA’s ruling Fatah party and the secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee.

In the interview, al-Ahmad said that the PLO does not view Hamas as a terrorist organization and is planning to allow the group to run in the Palestinian Authority’s municipal elections, slated for April.

Hamas, he continued, is an integral part of the Palestinian “fabric.”

“We’ve never regarded them as a terrorist organization,” al-Ahmad said. “They are part of the Palestinian national fabric.”

Al-Ahmad emphasized that the PLO rejects calls for Hamas to be disarmed, slamming US pressure on Hamas as “unacceptable.”

“All talk of disarming Hamas and it being a terrorist organization is unacceptable to us.”

The former Palestinian Authority minister, who also briefly served as deputy premier, strongly criticized the Trump administration’s approach to the Gaza Strip, arguing that American opposition to Hamas involvement in the postwar governance of Gaza is part of a broader attempt to keep Palestinians from running the strip.

“They don’t want Palestinians generally,” al-Ahmad said, while calling US demands that the Palestinian Authority reform a “false pretense.”

“We believe the primary goal of these demands is to waste time.”

Turning to the October 7 invasion of Israel, al-Ahmad described the attacks as a “strategic error that inflicted immense damage on Gaza.”