Where is Hamas today, 32 years after it was founded

Motasem A Dalloul

Hamas released its first statement on 14 December 1987, just five days after the start of the first intifada. The intifada was triggered when an Israeli lorry driver ran over a number of Palestinian labourers east of Gaza city while they were returning home after a long working day in Israel, killing four and wounding 10 others.

Hamas is a Palestinian movement with an Islamic ideology that has dedicated itself to fighting the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Its spiritual founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was a quadriplegic, was assassinated by an Israeli helicopter on 22 March 2004. His assassination was directly supervised by the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

As soon as it was launched, Hamas ordered its members and supporters across the occupied territories to be extensively involved in the intifada. Hamas had deep roots among the Palestinians it made with two decades of organised charity work that included health and education services, as well as sports and cultural activities.

During that period, between 1967 and 1987, Hamas established a number of multi-branch social charities in Gaza and the West Bank that run schools. In addition, it established one major university in Gaza.

The PLO, which includes all the Palestinian factions except Hamas and Islamic Jihad, had been involved in secret peace talks with Israel dating back to 1972. According to what the current Fatah and PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas has said, Israel thought about terminating Hamas in order to stop the first intifada. It arrested all Hamas leaders, including Yassin, but it found that Hamas had alternative formations that led the movement and kept popular resistance active.

The Israeli occupation escalated its crackdown on popular resistance, pushing the Palestinians to escalate and use arms. Hamas established its military wing Al-Qassam Brigades, which started to target Palestinian collaborators and Israeli soldiers. With the Israeli escalation increasing, the Palestinian resistance widened its scale of targets until it started to carry out suicide attacks in the heart of Israeli cities.

In 1996, Hamas refused to take part in the first Palestinian parliamentary elections, arguing that the Palestinian Authority, which was established after the Oslo Peace Accords between the PLO and Israel, is absurd. Citing the Israeli failure to fulfil its pledges made through Oslo and the escalation of settlement building, Hamas believed that the peace process was only made to give Israel time to strengthen its occupation. So, it continued its resistance, making itself a target of the PA, which violently cracked down on its leaders, members and resistance infrastructure.

Israeli and PA actions on the ground reinforced Hamas’ belief that Oslo was not meant to make peace. On 25 February 1994, the Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein broke into Al-Ibrahimi Mosque and opened fire on Palestinian worshipers during Al-Fajr prayer, killing 29 and wounding over 1,245 others, triggering wide-scale counter resistance attacks by Hamas, which started to use suicide bombings in response to increasing Israeli violence and the silence of the PA.

Hamas’ Khaled Meshaal with the Palestinian Authority/PLO’s Mahmoud Abbas [file photo]

Meanwhile, on 19 November 1994, the PA security services stormed Felesteen Mosque in the centre of Gaza City and opened fire on worshippers during Friday prayers, killing more than a dozen and wounding over 100 others. The PA attack aimed at preventing Hamas from organising a popular funeral for its member Naser Sallouha, who had been killed by the PA the previous day. Hamas did not respond and stressed it would never aim its gun at any Palestinian whatever he does.

In 1996, Hamas was subject to the harshest crackdown in its history as the PA arrested hundreds of its leaders and members and destroyed all of its resistance infrastructure. I have heard confirmed reports stressing that American and Israeli intelligence officers investigated Hamas members and tortured them inside PA prisons. In fact, the PA succeeded in dismantling Hamas’ organisational structure, but in October 1997, Israel released Ahmed Yassin in return for the release of two Mossad agents who failed to assassinate the Chief of Hamas’ Political Bureau in Amman Khalid Mashal.

When the second intifada started, Hamas was heavily involved in the armed resistance and started to manufacture rockets and RPGs and recently drones, causing much damage to the Israeli occupation.

In a dramatic change in policy, Hamas agreed to take part in the parliamentary elections in 2006, accepting an implicit truce. Hamas won the elections and formed the government alone after the other Palestinian factions rejected joining a coalition government headed by the Islamic movement.

Fatah, Israel, the US and most of the Western and Arab countries rejected dealing with Hamas. Fatah and the PA caused security chaos, pushing Hamas to sweep them out of Gaza in June 2007, leading the PA to separate the Gaza Strip from the West Bank. The former has been controlled by Hamas since then and the latter controlled by the PA, which is dominated by Fatah and backed by Israel and the international community.

Since then, Israel has continued its violations against Palestinians. It carried out several offensives on Gaza, including three major ones, pushing Hamas to launch hundreds of rockets towards the Israeli settlements and cities near Gaza. Over these years, Gaza has been under a strict Israeli siege that rendered the coastal enclave to be, according to many international reports, uninhabitable by 2020 due to the lack of clean water, severe shortage of electricity, lack of medicine and medical equipment at hospitals and severe unrepairable damage of infrastructure due to the Israeli attacks.

Now there have been reports about Hamas’ indirect contact with Israel, either through Egypt or through the UN peace envoy in the region for the sake of reaching a settlement for the ongoing conflict on condition of the complete end of the Israeli siege on Gaza and lifting Israeli sanctions on movement of Gaza residents.

Critics see that Hamas has exceeded the concessions of principles made by Fatah and the other PLO factions, who conceded 78 per cent of the area of historical Palestine to the state of Israel, arguing that Hamas has ignored Jerusalem, the refugees and the borders, and is currently talking to Israel just to improve the life of a portion of the Palestinians who live in Gaza.

On these claims, Hamas Spokesman Hazim Qasim said: “Hamas has been the protector of Palestinian principles and Palestinian rights. The news about a truce with Israel in return for a fraction of our rights is completely fake. Hamas is seeking a complete end to the Israeli siege and the improvement of the life of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Regarding a long-term truce or a deal with Israel, he said: “Hamas does not reject transitional solutions. This was proposed by Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who said: ‘Hamas would accept a long-term solution in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967’.”

He added: “Sheikh Yassin said: ‘The Palestinian freedom fighters [will] not lay down their arms before their aims are achieved.’ They are seeking solutions without conceding their rights,” he said.

“We hope that the Israeli occupation ends peacefully, but if not, we are still ready for it,” he concluded, stressing “this was the main Hamas principle laid down by Sheikh Yassin, who said: ‘We feel sorry for any bloodshed. We feel sorry for killing even a cat. We feel sorry for killing any human, whether he is a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim, but we do not feel sorry for killing the one who comes to kill us or displace us from our homes. This is the legitimate resistance which is guaranteed by international law.’”

When a whole society supports a terrorist organization

Jonathan Ofir

Palestinians flee with their belongings from the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City to the center of town to seek refugee at a UN school, on August 19, 2014. Warplanes bombed the strip after Palestinian rockets smashed into the country's south. Photo by Ezz al-Zanoun

After the 2008-9 Israeli onslaught on Gaza that took 1500 lives, a UN fact-finding mission concluded that the three-week campaign was “a deliberately disproportionate attack, designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” Note the word “terrorize.” 

But was this an isolated incident? Not at all. Israel has a long and sordid history of state-terrorist activity. There was the pre-state terror, which eventually served as a means of ethnic cleansing, known as the Nakba of 1948. Those Palestinians who tried to return were shot by the thousands, most of them unarmed.

In the early 1950’s, David Ben-Gurion ordered a massive state-terrorist operation in response to the murder of a Jewish family by Palestinian guerillas. Although the suspects were not found, a “retaliatory” attack was conducted across the Jordanian border in Qibya, commanded by Ariel Sharon. Dozens of houses were blown up with their residents inside, about 70 killed. Ben-Gurion cynically tried to attribute the attack to “Jews from the Arab countries or survivors of the Nazi concentration camps”, apparently the lowest stratum he could think of for his cowardly blaming – above Palestinians, that is.

It goes on and on. In 2017 I had a debate with a self-proclaimed ”burning Zionist” for a radio podcast, where I pointed out that the former Prime Israeli Minister Menachem Begin was a terrorist. My counterpart argued that since Begin concluded a peace agreement with Egypt (1979), he must be considered a dove in our times. I regret not having yet had the chance to read about Israel’s false-flag terror campaign in Lebanon under Begin’s premiership. The revelations about this roughly-four-year campaign in the years 1979-83, a campaign which took the lives of hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, came out last year in Ronen Bergman’s book “Rise and Kill First.” These things are often censored, and years pass until you hear about them. And I’m not even getting into the whole 1st Lebanon war in 1982 which killed almost 20,000 people, roughly half of whom were civilians, all in order to avert a Palestinian ‘peace offensive’. The false-flag terror campaign served as part of the pretext for that war.

And just as I write these words, there has been another “targeted assassination” by Israeli forces in Gaza, of Baha Abu al-Ata, of Islamic Jihad.

But there is also the daily terrorization – like last month’s kidnapping and terrorization of 10-year old Qusay al-Jaar by Israeli soldiers, meant to extract information from him about other masked youths he did not know.

Terrorization has been a consistent means of the Israeli state and army vis-à-vis Palestinians. As Moshe Dayan said in 1955:

The only method that proved effective, not justified or moral but effective, when Arabs plant mines on our side [is retaliation]. If we try to search for the [particular] Arab [who planted mines], it has not value. But if we harass the nearby village…then the population there comes out against the [infiltrators]…the method of collective punishment so far has proved effective.

This policy is a violation of international law. But Israelis generally accept it as a ‘necessary evil’ – notice Dayan’s “not justified or moral but effective”. This is why Gaza is being terrorized, this time, ostensibly, for electing Hamas. The unarmed protesters who are being shot and killed by the hundreds are but an extension of the siege policy. The recent siege, which came in the wake of Hamas’s election victory in 2006, is also but an extension of a longer historical siege. Palestinians are simply under a continuing colonialist siege, designed to reduce their territory and their presence.

So when anti-Apartheid BDS activist Adi Shosberger stands near the Gaza perimeter and calls Israeli soldiers out for being terrorists, Israelis start threatening her family.

Israelis generally accept this terror, but they won’t have it called out as such. These things that the Israeli army does are just things that have to be done, as it were, by the most moral army in the world. And it’s all about security, it’s about protecting your country. How dare you criticize!

My uncle died in the 1973 October war, in the sands of the Egyptian Sinai desert. He was actually in the jeep with Ehud Barak, in the elite Matkal commando unit. They were trying to rebuff the Egyptian surprise attack, which came after Israeli refusal to respond to Egyptian President Sadat’s peace overtures of land for peace. They were trying to defend Israel’s 1967 occupation. Dayan said that he preferred “Sharm al Sheikh without peace” to “Peace without Sharm al Sheikh” (referring to the Sinai coastal town). So my uncle died in defense of the Israeli occupation of Egypt, which was eventually abandoned through the peace agreement. But you can’t mention him as an occupation soldier. No, in the collective memory he needs to be remembered as a hero who defended our country.

But occupation is simply what Israel does, it’s always been doing it. This is part of its settler-colonialist expansionist nature. And because there are people involved, not just deserts and sand, then terrorization of the population is an inherent part of the army’s activity. Therefore, the Israeli army is essentially an occupation army, and terror is part of its very nature.

Israeli peace and BDS activist Yonatan Shapira, who used to be a helicopter pilot, says it clearly: “I was part of a terrorist organization.”

In July 2002, Salah Shehadeh, head of the armed branch of Hamas in Gaza, was bombed in the middle of the night with an F-16 dropping a one-ton bomb on his house where he was sleeping with his children and his wife. The bomb killed fifteen people, most of them children, and about 150 were injured. If I needed some answer for my questions and doubts, that was clear: this is a terror attack. And I’m part of a terror organization.

Shapira wrote a letter in 2003 together with 26 other Israeli air force pilots, refusing to fly over occupied territories. He has told how, when the letter made headlines, his father, a former pilot, passed by a military colleague, a General, by a newsstand and the General remarked that these refusers should be executed.

There is a huge reverence of the military amongst Israelis. Jewish Israelis are by far most trusting of the military (82%), more than they trust local municipalities (61%), the parliament (38%) or political parties (22%). Thus, the military is a kind of societal cult in Israel. This also goes to explain the overwhelming impunity of Israeli soldiers, who commit war crimes daily with little or no consequence.

This also explains why, to speak as I do about the Israeli military, is generally considered a kind of heresy.

I’m nearing my 50’s. It is now the time where the next generation, my children and the children of my siblings (who live in Israel), are at the age where they join the army. And it’s like a moral ritual – of course you join the army, what else?

The late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz has called the military refusers “heroes”. But these conscientious objectors are treated as criminals in Israel, and are generally subject to societal shaming.

I live in Denmark, and I consider it one of my great successes that I have raised children who have not joined the Israeli army. Living away from Israel is one aspect in distancing yourself from this militarism. But there are many Jewish Zionist youths who volunteer from abroad to join the Israeli army. They perhaps feel that they are fulfilling a heroic duty. I can understand it, I used to be a victim of that Zionist brainwashing and I had those feelings in that age. I haven’t told my children “Don’t do it”, because I feel a responsibility to not invade my children’s privacy in that way (plus, you know how teens can end up doing the opposite…). But I think I did manage to distance them from this militaristic pull. I can’t say whether this would eventually have saved a Palestinian from being bombed, kidnapped or tortured, but I like to think that it saved something in the life of my own offspring. If we were living in Israel, if they were growing up there, the societal pull would likely take them to the military. And even if they would be doing a desk-job, they would be part of this terrorist organization which calls itself the Israeli Defense Forces.

This organization, the IDF, has become very strong in presenting itself as moral and liberal, through its Twitter account, which regularly runs Hasbara about being the most Vegan and LGBT friendly army in the world. It boasts of women-soldiers donating their hair to cancer patients, as cancer patients die in Gaza due to the siege.

The Israeli military is a huge ideological shield for Zionism. The fealty that is offered to it by most of the Israeli society provides a useful ideological firewall against effective challenging of Israeli oppression of Palestinians, and it makes people feel that they need to mute their critique of Israeli war crimes, since we are supposedly all part of this army, in one way or another, directly or by extension. It’s all about security, as it were.

This also explains why a military record of any kind is like a minimal prerequisite in many lines of work in Israel. Not having been there is suspect. If you haven’t paid tribute to the Zionist terror organization, something must be wrong with you.

Jonathan Ofir

70 years of shooting refugees

Jake Batinga

Despite Israel’s brutality, Palestinians have insisted for seven decades that the right of refugees to return home be upheld. 

Ashraf AmraAPA images

Since March 2018, weekly protests – known as the Great March of Return – have been held in Gaza.

The demonstrators are insisting that people uprooted by Zionist forces during the Nakba – the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine – be allowed to go home. This right of return has been recognized by United Nations General Assembly resolution 194, passed in December 1948.

Israel has responded brutally to demands that this basic right be upheld. More than 210 Palestinians have been killed during the Great March of Return and more than 9,000 have been injured by live fire.

As well as insisting that the right to return be respected, Palestinian refugees have occasionally attempted to exercise that right over the past seven decades. In doing so, they have been treated with extreme violence.

In the years following the adoption of UN resolution 194, large numbers of people living in Gaza tried to cross the boundary with Israel, a newly established state. In an Orwellian turn of phrase, the Israeli authorities designated these returning refugees as “infiltrators.”

In his book Israel’s Border Wars, the historian Benny Morris writes that the so-called infiltration was “a direct consequence of the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.”

Refugees sought to reunite with family, tend crops, recover lost possessions and, of course, see their old homes.

Firing “at anything that moved”

Israel’s Border Wars was published in 1997 – seven years before Morris argued that Zionist forces should have expelled all Palestinians in the 1940s. Despite his attempts to defend ethnic cleansing, Morris has never repudiated the important facts he had previously unearthed.

And we can continue to learn a considerable amount from his work about crimes committed in the name of Israel and its state ideology Zionism.

He recounts, for example, how Israel operated a “free fire” policy on refugees seeking to return home. According to Morris, Israeli forces “fired at anything that moved” and often executed injured refugees “on the spot.”

Between 2,700 and 5,000 refugees were killed under the free fire policy, the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians, from 1949 to 1956. Furthermore, “no Israeli soldier, policeman, or civilian was ever tried for shooting and killing an unarmed Arab infiltrator,” Morris writes.

While Palestinian refugees were slaughtered for attempting to exercise their right of return, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, passed the cynically titled “Law of Return” in 1950. It granted Jews from around the world the right to gain Israeli citizenship and live in Israel.

Immigrants to Israel, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, often settled in the vacant homes of Palestinian refugees.

Another policy implemented against Palestinian refugees seeking to go home was known as “retaliation.”

Israel “retaliated” by raiding villages in Jordan, Egypt, Gaza, and Syria. These raids were meant to punish communities that had allegedly helped returning refugees.

In his book The Iron Wall, the historian Avi Shlaim writes that the reprisals were effectively “a form of collective punishment against whole villages.”

One notable case of “retaliation” occurred during October 1953 in the Jordanian village of Qibya.

According to Shlaim’s book, Israeli commandos raided Qibya, forced the residents to stay in their homes, then blew up the houses with everyone still inside. At least 69 people were killed, most of them women and children.

The leader of this raid was a young commander named Ariel Sharon, who would later be dubbed the “butcher of Beirut” for his role in the 1982 mass slaughter at Sabra and Shatila, Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

Shifting the blame

Israel has consistently sought to shift the blame for its own violence.

In the 1950s, the Israeli government blamed Arab governments and Palestinian refugees themselves. According to Shlaim, Israel claimed that the killing of civilians was a “legitimate form of self-defense.”

Identical – or almost identical – words are used by Israel’s political leaders today.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has invoked “self-defense” to try and justify the killing of unarmed protesters in Gaza. After one Israeli massacre in Gaza last year, Netanyahu claimed the state was acting “to protect its sovereignty and the security of its citizens.”

When a video was broadcast which showed Israeli troops gleefully cheering and laughing as a sniper shoots a protester, Israeli politicians rushed to defend the troops.

Avigdor Lieberman, then Israel’s defense minister, stated that the sniper in the video “deserves a commendation.” Naftali Bennett, also a government minister at the time, said that “judging soldiers because they are not expressing themselves elegantly while they are defending our borders is not serious.”

Today, the Israeli government smears Gaza protesters as “terrorists.” Benny Morris has noted how “infiltrator” – the term applied to Palestinian refugees seeking to go home – quickly became synonymous with “terrorist.”

And just as the Israeli authorities tried to evade responsibility for its attacks on Arab neighbors in the 1950s, today’s politicians try to blame Hamas for the deaths of protesters in Gaza.

Lieberman has alleged that “no innocent civilians” have taken part in Gaza’s protests, which he has nicknamed the “march of terror.” All the protesters, according to Lieberman, have been Hamas members.

Another pattern can be discerned. Palestinians fought for their rights in the years immediately following the Nakba, as they are doing in the 21st century.

Israeli brutality continues – and so does the struggle against it.

Jake Batinga is a California-based writer and activist. He lived in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, while working with the International Solidarity Movement, documenting human rights abuses by the Israeli army and settlers.

US, land of the free – unless you want to criticize Israel

Philip Roddi

The Zionist regime, which Britain planted in the heart of the Islamic Ummah in Palestine in 1948 after illegally settling hundreds of thousands of east European Jews in this Muslim land, is approaching a position once the preserve of the apartheid regime of South Africa.

It is vulnerable, despite the support of Western ruling elites, to grassroots boycott, says photo-journalist Philip Roddi in his article for MintPress, titled: “US, Land of the Free – Unless You Want to Criticize Israel”.

A map below shows the gradual spread across the USA of laws against support for the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) Movement. It was compiled by Palestine Legal, an organization dedicated to protecting the civil rights of Americans who speak out for Palestinian freedom. One state with anti-BDS legislation on its books is Texas.

The bill’s language is so sweeping that some victims of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Southwest Texas in late 2017, were told they could only receive state disaster relief if they first signed a pledge never to boycott Israel. That demand was deeply confusing to those hurricane victims in desperate need of help but who could not understand what their views of Israel and Palestine had to do with their ability to receive assistance from their state government.

The evangelical author of the Israel bill, Republican Texas state Rep. Phil King, said at the time that its application to hurricane relief was a “misunderstanding,” but nonetheless emphasized that the bill’s purpose was indeed to ensure that no public funds ever go to anyone who supports a boycott of Israel. This is what Greg Abbott, Governor of Texas, had to say when he signed more than a year-and-a-half ago, King’s bill into law on May 2, 2017

Now meet Bahia Amawi, a speech therapist in the lone star state. Having lost her job for refusing to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel, she’s suing the state of Texas in a bid to repeal the law which compelled an Austin school district to fire her for so refusing.

According to reports: “Amawi worked with the local Arabic-speaking community at the Pflugerville Independent School District since 2009, on a contract basis. She told the news site that the district renewed her contract each year without incident, but when she received the documents for the 2018-19 school year in August, Amawi said it included a new clause requiring that she “not boycott Israel during the term of the contract,” and refrain from any action “that is intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with Israel, or with a person or entity doing business in Israel, or in an Israel-controlled territory.”

Washington Post has Pflugerville District, which alongside State Attorney General Ken Paxton is in the firing line of Amawi’s lawsuit, saying: “This language is required by the State of Texas for all school districts in Texas, along with other governmental entities. Unfortunately … all Texas school districts are at the mercy of the state and the regulations printed into law, and in situations such as this, we are forced to spend time on state political issues and not on our core mission — educating students.”

Nor is Bahia Amawi the only one suffering here. The Intercept site tells us that:

 “Because Amawi, to her knowledge, is the only certified Arabic-speaking child’s speech pathologist in the district, it is quite possible that the refusal to renew her contract will leave dozens of young children with speech pathologies without any competent expert to evaluate their conditions and treatment needs.”

The Intercept goes on to quote Amawi directly: “If I [signed the pledge] I would not only be betraying Palestinians suffering under an occupation that I believe is unjust and thus become complicit in their repression, but I’d also be betraying my fellow Americans by enabling violations of our constitutional rights to free speech and to protest peacefully. The point of boycotting any products that support Israel is to put pressure on Israel to change its treatment, the inhumane treatment of the Palestinian people”

Three comments in this regard. One is that though the hard left was in the main always opposed to Israel, or at any rate its policies on the Palestinians, the liberal left tended, mindful of recent European history, not only to support it but give it a blank cheque on whatever it deemed had to be done. That began to change after the Shatila and Sabra camp massacres in Lebanon in 1982 by the then Zionist war minister, Ariel Sharon – who later became premier and was struck by divine wrath of several years for his crimes before a miserable death.

Since then its acts have seen the weight of liberal and center-left opinion steadily tilting away from Israel, to the point where the Zionist regime is approaching a position once the preserve of South Africa. It is obvious Israel is vulnerable, despite the support of Western ruling elites, to grassroots boycott. Recognition that, for all its hasbara, Israel is losing the propaganda war is the context in which anti-BDS legislation within its ally and primary underwriter should be seen.

Another point is that this shift is analogous to that much wider change which has seen mainstream Western media slowly losing their grip on our hearts and minds. Thanks to the rise of the internet – with its triple whammy of vastly extended choice of news sources, many-to-many social media and, related but distinct, a threat to revenues for corporate media’s two-hundred-year-old business model – a ruling class monopoly on opinion formation and manufactured consent is weakened. This poses problems for a status quo loaded massively in favor of the few against the many. (All the more so when, as now, war drums are beating.) Like those anti-BDS laws, the war on fake news is best understood as early skirmish within conflicts greater, more fraught and ultimately more far-reaching in significance.

But one of capitalism’s many dialectics is that for all its terrifying instability, it is adaptive in its Borg-like ability to accommodate all – or at any rate most – opposition, not to mention its own crimes, which brings us back to the issue at hand. Given more confidence in the survival of our species I’d offer generous odds on Bahia Amawi being granted, half a century from now, Rosa Parks status.

Can Israel Indefinitely Delay Palestinians’ Resolve for Return Home?

By: Kayhan Int’l

The illegal Zionist entity has tightened its tentacles on Palestinians, subjecting them to more atrocities, as the Occupied Land is witnessed a series of regular protests since March 30 dubbed as "The Great March of Return.”

For past 7 decades Palestinians have been demanding the return to the original homes of those driven out of their ancestral lands by the illegal Zionist migrants of Eastern Europe, who have no connection to this land since they are not the offspring of the original Israelite tribes. As a matter of fact, many of the Palestinian Muslims although their mother tongue is Arabic and they are called Arabs, are the direct descendants of the ancient Israelite tribes.

Ever since the right to return which was formulated for the first time on 27 June 1948 by United Nations mediator Folke Bernadotte, proponents of the right of return regard it as a sacred human right, whose applicability both generally and specifically, is guaranteed by international law.

During his speech yesterday, the leader of the Palestine’s Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, paid tribute to the latest martyrs, that is, the seven Palestinians killed on Friday by Zionist forces. He vowed the weekly rallies will continue as long as the Gaza Strip remains under siege.

According to the latest figures released by the Gaza Health Ministry around 200 Palestinians have so far been martyred and over 20,000 others wounded. Yet the struggle for liberation of their Zionist-usurped homeland continues, without the least dampening of hopes.

This is indicative of the indomitable spirit of the Palestinians, who despite the inhuman measures of the Zionists for the past several weeks, and in spite of being shunned by fellow Arab countries, are determined to continue their struggle in the face of Israel’s aerial bombardment and artillery shelling.

The point which we would like to emphasize is the right to return to their homeland as is evident the "Great Return March”.

In 1948 when the British illegally planted Israel in the heart of the Islamic World, over 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and hearths by the Zionists.
They ended up as refugees in neighbouring lands, but with the resolve to return home one day. As a result the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194 on December 11, 1948, recognizing the right of return.

It is rather unfortunate that the West unabashedly ignores the rights of the oppressed Palestinian people, whether Muslims or Christians, to return to their homeland, while the illegal Zionist entity, backed by its godfathers in London and Washington, and now supported by the treasonous Arab regimes, especially Saudi Arabia, continues its crimes against humanity.

It is obvious that the vast majority of refugees should be considered as victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing during 1948 and the subsequent years, including the periodic massacres such as Deir Yassin, in order to drive them out of Palestine.

It is time the free world seriously took up the issue of the right of return as a non-negotiable Palestinian right, otherwise it would be a great injustice to an entire nation.
The Zionist entity fully knows that if Palestinians were to succeed in their endeavour to return home, then the whole issue of Israel would be stake. It was for this reason, the Butcher of Sabra and Shatilla, Ariel Sharon, who later became Zionist premier, and was finally struck by divine wrath for his crimes against humanity by lying in the state of coma for several years, had once criminally remarked that the Palestinians must drop their demand for the right of return, since this was "a recipe for Israel’s destruction”.

Irrespective of the mindset of the usurpers, who themselves know that Israel is on flimsy ground, it is the duty of not just Arab and other Muslim countries, but the whole free world to support the displaced Palestinian people, including their demand to return home.