The head of the Islamist group Hamas’s political branch, Khaled Meshaal, has announced that his group will not renew its fragile truce with Israel when it expires at the end of the year.
”We will not enter a new truce while our people are surrounded and are preparing for a new round of conflict,” Meshaal told a rally on Friday at the al-Yarmouk quarter in Damascus, home to the largest Palestinian community in Syria.
”We have had enough of the truce while our prisoners are still held,” he told the meeting marking 38 years since the creation of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
The United States shrugged off the Hamas announcement.
”We’ve always made clear that truces are good only insofar as they go, and that’s really not very far,” said deputy State Department spokesperson Adam Ereli in Washington.
He accused Hamas of pursuing violence against innocent civilians and urged the Palestinian Authority to take action against it and another group, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Meshaal’s announcement came amid heightened violence in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, with Israel carrying out lethal raids following Monday’s suicide bombing in the northern Israeli city of Netanaya in which five people died.
”There’s no question of agreeing a new truce and there’s no point in negotiating, because the policy of procrastinating over applying agreements pushes us not to renew the truce,” he said.
Palestinian groups agreed to the truce at a meeting in Cairo in March, but it has been far from watertight since then, with militants retaliating for targeted assassinations of their leaders carried out by the Israeli military.
”The Palestinian gun will always be pointed only at the Zionist enemy and peace can only be achieved through the gun,” Meshaal told the gathering attended by representatives of other Palestinian militant groups, including Islamic Jihad.
Since Monday’s suicide attack, which was claimed by Islamic Jihad, dozens of activists from all the main armed factions have been arrested by Israeli troops in the West Bank.
More than 20 Hamas members were arrested on Thursday, including the mayor of Beit Liqiya, a town near Ramallah in the West Bank.
An Islamic Jihad official said more than 120 of its members have been arrested since the bombing, which Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas strongly condemned as a ”terrorist attack”. He vowed to hunt down the perpetrators.
Another Hamas chief, Mahmud Zahar, said last month that the movement would not be obliged to prolong the truce if Israel did not end its attacks on Palestinian territory and free thousands of detained Palestinians.
Hamas spokesperson Mushir al-Masri has also warned that ”the quiet will finish at the end of this year”, saying that groups that signed up to the Cairo truce agreed at the time to review the situation ahead of 2006.
”No one should dream there will be another quiet,” when faced with escalating violence from Israel, Masri warned on November 2.
PFLP official Maher al-Taher agreed that the Cairo truce has ”no more sense, given the continued policies of terrorism and liquidation carried out by Israel”.
Hamas is due to take part in Palestinian parliamentary elections on January 25, in which the Islamist group stands to pose a serious challenge to Abbas’s ruling Fatah party.
Meanwhile, Mideast quartet diplomats met in Jerusalem to examine the ways of kick-starting talks between Israel and the Palestinians after another week of bloodshed, a United Nations spokesperson said.
The talks, which were held at the UN headquarters in Jerusalem, were attended by US Middle East envoy David Welch; European Union envoy Marc Otte; his Russian counterpart, Alexander Kalugin; and the UN special envoy, Alvaro de Soto.
UN spokesperson Henriette von Kaltenborn said that the talks focused on ”implementation of the agreement over movement and access” between Gaza and the West Bank, which was brokered last month by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. — Sapa-AFP