Hamas Switches Tactics, To Target Israeli Leaders
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“From here on out, targeting a leader, minister, or head of the government of the Zionist entity will be treatment in kind… since they are giving the orders" |
BEIRUT,
August 10 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The Islamic resistance
group, Hamas, said on Friday, August 9 that it will target Israeli
leaders in response to the Israeli tactic of killing senior
Palestinian officials whom they claim are behind attacks carried out
against Israelis, news agencies reported.
Usama
Hamdan, who heads Hamas in Lebanon, said Israel's recent assassination
of two senior Hamas figures - one in an air strike on a residential
building that killed 14, nine of them children- meant Hamas's military
actions should expand beyond resistance bombings in public places.
"From
here on out, targeting a leader, minister, or the head of the
government of the Zionist entity will be treatment in kind,
particularly since they are giving the orders (to kill
Palestinians)," he added.
"The
Palestinian response...will extend to the killers and it will extend
to those who consent to being ruled by the killers."
Hamdan
was voicing the recent harder line taken by Hamas against individual
Israeli leaders. The
spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassine,
said in an interview published Wednesday, July 24, that Hamas
was ready to declare a “conditional truce” before Israel launched
its deadly raid in Gaza.
“It
is true ... (that Hamas) was ready to declare a truce, on certain
conditions, not only an Israeli withdrawal” from reoccupied
Palestinian areas, Yassine told Spain’s ABC newspaper.
Hamas
warned Wednesday, July 24 that every Israeli is now a target for
attack, following Israel’s devastating F-16 air strike on Gaza City.
“Every
Israeli, at any time and in any place, is now a target for strikes by
the Palestinian resistance,” Hamas spokesman Mahmoud al-Zahar said,
quoted by Egypt’s news agency MENA.
A
more senior Hamas figure said on Wednesday, August 7, that the group,
which has killed dozens of Israelis in Palestinian resistance bombings
during the Palestinian uprising, should target Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon to avenge a Hamas leader shot by an Israeli sniper in Gaza.
Hamas
has carried out two attacks that killed at least 16 people since
Israel killed Hamas’s senior leader Salah Shehada last month in an
air strike on his home in a crowded Gaza City neighborhood.
Hamdan's
comments came as Palestinian cabinet members met U.S. National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Thursday August 8 to sidestep a
dispute over U.S. demands to keep out Palestinian President Yasser
Arafat.
The
meeting comes after a failed round of Israeli-Palestinian talks that
proposed easing Israel's military grip on the West Bank and Gaza if
the Palestinian Authority (PA) cracks down on resistance groups.
Hamdan
said Israel hoped to use those talks to get the assistance of Arafat's
PA in targeting resistance fighters, to detonate the fires of a
Palestinian civil war.
"Sharon's
proposal...stipulates the arrest of certain people and house arrest.
It stipulates a Palestinian civil war and internal
confrontation," he said.
"If
the PA wants to confront the resistance it must confront the
Palestinian people," Hamdan said.
At
least 1,792 Palestinians and 598 Israelis have been killed since the
Palestinian Intifada erupted in September 2000 after the Israeli prime
minister, the then defense
minister, Ariel Sharon’s controversial visit to Jerusalem's al-Aqsa
mosque compound - the third holiest site in Islam.
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