Hamas: Palestinian resistance will eventually lift Israel’s siege on Gaza

The Palestinian resistance will finally succeed in lifting Israel’s years-long siege on the impoverished Gaza Strip and commence its reconstruction, the resistance movement Hamas says.

In a press statement, carried by the Palestinian Information Center, Hamas Political Bureau member Mousa Abu Marzouk said on Sunday that all options are on the table to deal with the Israeli behavior. “We will not accept any Israeli delays or any attempts to link the prisoners swap deal with the reconstruction file,” the Hamas official added.

Gaza, home to some two million Palestinians, has been under Israeli siege since June 2007.  The tight blockade has caused a decline in the standards of living as well as unprecedented levels of unemployment and unrelenting poverty.

Abu Marzouk further stressed that the Gaza-based Hamas is working to relieve Gaza citizens’ suffering, saying that the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is based in the occupied West Bank, does not want any solution for the blockaded enclave except after removing Hamas from the scene. The Ramallah-based PA, which is run by the ruling Fatah party and led by President Mahmoud Abbas, considers Hamas as its arch-rival.

“Fatah movement deals with the institutions of the Palestinian people as a private property,” the Hamas official went on to say, accusing Fatah of being one of the most important causes of Palestinian crises. He said the establishment of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is supposed to be according to a transparent and fair mechanism, and “not according to the Fatah movement.”

Abu Marzouk further emphasized that there is a necessity to reshape the leadership of the Palestinian people according to democratic and national foundations, to strengthen partnership in decision-making, to end current monochromic attitude, and to rebuild the PLO so that it encompasses all components of the Palestinian people.

Haniyeh: Zionist enemy has no future on Palestinian land

Ismail Haniyeh says the Israeli occupation “has no future” in the Palestinian territories.

Elsewhere in his remarks, he also hailed efforts by Russia to end the Palestinian division, stressing that Hamas has no conditions on national dialogs, and has never set conditions for commencing new rounds of dialog.

Abu Marzouk noted that Hamas had welcomed the Russian invitation, but that “officials in the Fatah movement did not inform the Russians of their response.”

The Palestinian leadership has been divided between Fatah and Hamas since 2006, when the latter scored a landslide victory in parliamentary elections in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has ever since been running the coastal enclave, while Fatah has been based in the autonomous parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Previous reconciliation attempts by the two sides to form a power-sharing unity government in Gaza and the West Bank have failed.

In the latest Israeli bombardment campaign against the Gaza Strip, at least 260 Palestinians, including over 60 children, were killed in a time span of 11 days that began on May 10 last year.

That came following Palestinian retaliation for violent Israeli raids on worshipers at al-Aqsa Mosque and the regime’s plans to force a number of Palestinian families out of their homes at the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East al-Quds.

In response, Palestinian resistance movements, chief among them Hamas, launched Operation al-Quds Sword and fired more than 4,000 rockets and missiles into the occupied territories, killing 12 Israelis.

Apparently caught off guard by the unprecedented barrage of rockets from Gaza, Israel announced a unilateral ceasefire on May 21, which Palestinian resistance movements accepted with Egyptian mediation.

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