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Hamas Not To Target Israelis Outside Palestinian Territories
DOHA, April 2 (IslamOnline) - The spiritual leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, Ahmed Yassin, pledged Sunday that his group will not carry out military operations against Israeli targets outside Palestinian occupied territories as his group's battle is only with "Israeli occupiers," and not with other countries.
"We are not fighting peoples of other religions or the Jews because they are Jews. We are fighting those who occupied our land, took our properties, made refugees out of our families and carried out massacres against our children and women," Yassin said in a live dialogue with visitors of IslamOnline.net's Arabic portal.
Hamas has been around as an organization for some 40 years, and was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that started when Jordan controlled what is now the West Bank and has always sought to "liberate" al-Aqsa Mosque, a holy Muslim shrine.
Hamas leaders expressed genuine surprise when they were put on a U.S. list of terrorist groups because they had confined their operations to Israel and the Palestinian territories - where "a legitimate state of war exists".
"Israel tried to shift the battle ground to outside the occupied territories," Yassin said. "We are aware of that. They tried to assassinate our leaders in Jordan and elsewhere. But they failed."
Yassin, the founder of the 45-year-old group, said his group does not seek to antagonize other countries just because they are friendly with "the Zionist enemy", saying that other countries may take measures against Hamas if the group were to execute operations on their sovereign land.
Meanwhile, Yassin, who enjoys wide support among Palestinians, called on Muslims and Arabs to help fund the Palestinian Authority as a way to keep the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation going, and that they should disregard claims that "corruption" in the Palestinian Authority (PA) bars a proper use of aid funds that come to Palestinians.
Arab leaders who promised Palestinians millions of dollars have been hesitant to send the money to the Palestinian Authority after press reports indicated that corruption was widespread in President Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, and that only a trickle of the cash reaches Palestinian victims of Israel's excessive use of force.
"This [corruption claims] shouldn't stop us to try [and] find proper ways that ensure aid reaches the Palestinian people in the occupied territories," Yassin said. "This shouldn't also stop us sending funds to the PA itself to strengthen it and make it stand up against the Israeli and the American governments."
Yassin said Palestinians have been getting some food, funds and other forms of aid from concerned individuals but "the Arab world doesn't allow us more than what we've already got."
During an Arab summit in Amman last week, Arab leaders backed Iraq in taking one billion euros ($900 million) from its oil-for-food program accounts in the form of emergency humanitarian aid to the Palestinians
The funds would be used to provide cash-strapped Palestinians, who have been waging a six-month uprising against Israeli occupation, with food, medicine and basic needs, and to aid families who have lost members to the Intifada (uprising).
Palestinian leaders have been decrying the absence of a mechanism to provide the PA with Arab funds pledged at an emergency summit of Arab leaders in Cairo last October. The Cairo summit ended with a pledge of one billion dollars of aid to the Palestinians split between two funds overseen by the Saudi-based Islamic Development Bank (IDB).
One fund is aimed at backing the Palestinian uprising against Israel, with the second geared towards the defense of Jerusalem's Arab communities. East Jerusalem was captured by Israel after the Jewish state launched an attack against neighboring Arab countries in 1967.
Several Arab countries have refused to supply direct aid to the PA, complaining the Palestinian regime lacks accountability in the management of its funds.
Meanwhile, the IslamOnline dialogue was the first time in which Yassin called for direct aid to the Palestinian Authority, and it was believed to be a sign of an increasing popularity for the group among Palestinians, living under a stringent Israeli blockade since September 28th when they started protests against Israeli occupation.
Hamas remained on the sidelines of the first Intifada in 1987 when it was taken by surprise as the uprising began against Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in December of that year. Its leaders issued a flurry of statements then, trying to catch up with Palestinian public mood. But the group only came into their own after they began organizing armed resistance operations on Israeli targets in the early 1990s.
They have also managed to avoid outright confrontation with Arafat's Authority, which made peace with Israel, although their actions against Israel led the U.S. to pressure Arafat to arrest and jail dozens of Hamas members, particularly in Gaza before the current uprising.
Yassin was himself a prisoner in Israeli prisons serving a life sentence until he was released in October 1997 in a deal with Jordan to obtain the release of two Mossad spy service agents caught in a bungled attempt to assassinate a senior Hamas political official in Amman.
Israel, which controls the borders of Palestinian-ruled Gaza, allowed him to return after weighing whether he could prove of a less resistance in Gaza or abroad. Yassin has toured Arab countries before and has reportedly collected millions of dollars for Hamas, whose military wing has killed scores of Israelis in martyr operation attacks since the 1993 signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace accord
Western experts have been unable to gauge the support base of Hamas, but many state that the group's popularity is on the rise as it poses the only credible resistance force able to stand up to Israel's military might.
Most of Israel's 60 killed during the current Intifada died as a result of Hamas operations.
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