BICOM

A Hamas co-founder has clarified that a recently published policy document did not contradict the terror group’s 1988 founding charter, and that Hamas aims to take control of all of historic Palestine, including Israel.

Mahmoud al-Zahar was speaking at a conference in Gaza addressing international reactions to the new policy document.

He said: “If we liberate Palestine though the resistance until the 1967 borders, we will go directly to liberate the rest of Palestine and the territories of 1948, and there will be no negotiations.”

Along with further inflammatory statements he said: “When people say that Hamas has accepted the 1967 borders, like others, it is an offense to us.”

The new document took years to draft so as to integrate a range of opinions from overseas veterans, prisoners, and the Gazan military wing. It was thought to be an attempt to mend relations with Egypt.

It states that Hamas believes “the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of 4 June 1967, to be a formula of national consensus”.

However, it also says that “there is no alternative to a fully sovereign Palestinian State on the entire national Palestinian soil” and that the terror group “rejects all attempts to erase the rights of the refugees, including the attempts to settle them outside Palestine”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has criticised those who claimed the document meant Hamas accepted a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In a video posted to his YouTube channel he symbolically threw it into the bin.

In further developments concerning Hamas, its new leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar is believed to have personally given the order to step up efforts for an attack to be carried out in the West Bank to avenge the death of a high ranking Hamas official, Mazen Fuqaha, who was shot dead outside his Gaza home in late March. Orders have reportedly been given by Sinwar to Hamas operatives in the West Bank to either stage a kidnapping operation or to commit an attack that results in numerous casualties.