The Palestinian Authority's payment of Hamas salaries on Wednesday - the day PA Prime Minister Salaam Fayad told American congressmen there would be no reconciliation with Hamas - was nothing less than a "slap in the face," said Eric Cantor, a Republican congressman from Virginia. "It was quite an awakening, if not a slap in the face, for our members this morning to wake up and read in your paper that Fayad and the PA have been paying some of the Hamas militias," Cantor, heading a delegation of 19 Republican congressmen, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
Cantor, the only Republican Jewish member of the US House of Representatives, said that Fayad had told the delegation something entirely different 24 hours before the story appeared. "He assured us that there was no attempt at reconciliation with Hamas, that there would be no remarriage with the terrorist organization - those were almost the exact words out of Prime Minister Fayad's mouth," Cantor said. |