Palestinians hold a protest march in Ramallah against the Trump peace plan as the Hamas terror group leader calls for Palestinians to wage war on Israel.
By Paul Shindman, World Israel News
The leader of the Hamas terror group in Gaza praised his rival, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, for cutting off ties with Israel and called for a new armed uprising against the Jewish state.
“We welcome the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s decision to disengage from all agreements with the Israeli occupation, but we need real actions,” Ismail Haniyeh said.
“It has been proven to all liberation movements around the world that liberation cannot be achieved unless a gun is raised,” Haniyeh said in comments carried by the PIC news agency affiliated with Hamas.
Haniyeh welcomed the support given the Palestinians by some Arab and Muslim countries, including objections to annexation by Jordan, calling for a rejection of the proposal by President Donald Trump earlier this year for a peace deal that would see a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
“No to the deal of the century,” Haniyeh said.
Also, on Monday in Ramallah, Abbas’s Fatah organization held a protest march at which several hundred people demonstrated “against the deal of the century and the decision of the occupation to annex our territory.”
One young boy held up a picture of terrorist leaders Yasser Arafat and Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin with the slogan ‘Why did they leave us.’
Arafat died in 2004 after leading the Palestine Liberation Organization for decades, during which it became infamous for airplane hijackings and two “intifada” uprisings in which Palestinian terrorists killed over 1,000 Israelis in waves of suicide bombings and shooting attacks. Yassin vehemently opposed the idea of peace with Israel and promoted Hamas suicide and rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. He was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza in 2004.
In a veiled threat to Abbas, Haniyeh also called to “rebuild the Palestine Liberation Organization and form an organized leadership for the Palestinian people.” He said the PLO “is now almost idle, and we are not calling for an alternative to it, but we do not accept that it be misused under the slogan ‘the legitimate and sole representative of the Palestinian people.’”
The Iran-backed Hamas has not hidden its desire to try and take control from Fatah, which would give it a platform in Judea and Samaria to launch attacks in its long-term goal to replace Israel with an Islamic state.