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| Middle East |
| Islamic Jihad, Hamas vow mindless opposition to virtually everything |
| 2002-08-19 |
| Hamas immediately rejected the 'Gaza First' plan and vowed to keep fighting Israeli occupation. "Hamas and the Palestinian people reject any agreement which aims at destroying our resistance and ending the intifada, which is what this agreement is aimed at," Gaza-based Hamas spokesman Ismail Haniya told AFP. Didn't take a 3-digit IQ to predict this, did it? "This will only give security and quiet to the Zionists and the occupation, not to our people," Haniya said. "We are not able to accept partial quiet in Gaza when all the cities, towns and refugee camps in the West Bank are under Israeli aggression and siege." "Half a loaf won't do us. Not even a whole loaf. We want the whole bakery, and we want the proprietor killed..." Asked whether he feared the Gaza First plan would provoke a crackdown on Hamas activists by Palestinian security forces, Haniya answered only that Hamas would never allow Palestinian national unity to be broken. "We will not allow (this agreement to cause) internal clashes because we have to have Palestinian national unity," he said. "And we'll kill anybody who disagrees..." Hania also slammed the agreement as a cynical "first step" to secure some kind of calm before an expected US attack on Iraq. "I am sure that the Israeli Zionists will not respect any agreement but this agreement is the first step before a strike on Iraq," he said. That's going to come whether Hamas is busy killing people or not... Meanwhile, Islamic Jihad has vowed to step up attacks on Israeli targets to thwart the deal. "The Palestinian people's answer will be to escalate the resistance to foil (Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin) Ben Eliezer's plan," said Khalid El-Batsh, a Gaza Strip leader for the Islamic Jihad. "We in Islamic Jihad reject this agreement because it will consecrate the Israeli occupation of our land," he told AFP. "This accord aims to destroy the intifada." From his point of view, that's a bad thing... |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |