BICOM

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal over the weekend reiterated his support for armed resistance against Israel. ‘What is needed today … is to have resistance in all forms, armed and public ones.” According to Reuters, he added that he intends to try to persuade Fatah to adopt his approach to force Israel to end its occupation. “Any occupier in the world never retreats voluntarily … It only retreats under pressure and force.” Speaking to reporters from Reuters in Cairo, Meshaal called on the United States and the European Union to support the reconciliation agreement between Fatah and Hamas. Meshaal said that the agreement represented the choice of the Palestinian people. He called on the US and the EU to apply pressure on Israel to recognise the Palestinians. He added that the issue of recognition of Israel could only be addressed once a Palestinian state was established.

Despite Meshaal’s call for Fatah to adopt Hamas’s approach, Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday reaffirmed his existing policy against terrorism and violence. ‘I hear rumours that Hamas will be in the West Bank, or that it will share authority here. This will not happen. The new government will comply with my policies, and I am against terror and violence,’ Abbas told visitors from J-Street. Abbas, in the same speech to visitors from J-Street, urged US Congress not to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in aid as a result of the unity agreement.

President Shimon Peres, in an interview described the Fatah-Hamas accord signed last week as ‘a temporary bridge.’ He added that PA President Mahmoud Abbas is ‘absolutely’ still a peace partner for Israel, despite his signing of a reconciliation agreement with Hamas. Israel has condemned the unity deal between Fatah and Hamas, because of Hamas’s refusal to adhere to Quartet principles, and its on-going acts of violence against Israelis.