(Gatestone Institute) Bassam Tawil - The leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad see Israel as one big settlement to be uprooted from the Middle East. For them, Tel Aviv, Ashdod, Haifa and Nazareth are all "occupied" cities. The Palestinian leaders say the conflict with Israel will end only when Israel is annihilated. In 2017, Hamas said it was ready to accept a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines without "giving up all of Palestine." In other words, Hamas would use these territories as a launching pad to "liberate the rest of Palestine." Hamas reaffirmed that it "rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea." Hamas and Islamic Jihad are not splinter factions that can be dismissed as irrelevant. The two groups control nearly two million Palestinians living in Gaza. They have thousands of militiamen in Gaza who consider themselves "soldiers" in the war to eliminate Israel and kill Jews. Any land that is given to Abbas and his Palestinian Authority in the West Bank will be used in the future by Hamas and Islamic Jihad as a base for launching rockets into Israeli cities.
2019-03-01 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive