Hamas supremo Khaled Meshaal said efforts to end the bitter feud with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas were deadlocked because of Israeli and US meddling, and insisted his men would stay in control of Gaza. And he warned in an interview with AFP that despite renewed efforts to forge peace between Israel and the Palestinians, resistance remained the only option for Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. | “Mediation efforts are at an impasse because they have shut all doors and rejected Palestinian and other Arab mediation,” Meshaal said in a telephone interview from Syria. |
Fierce rivalry between Hamas and Abbas’s secular Fatah boiled over into deadly fighting which saw the Islamist movement seize control of the Gaza Strip in mid-June, effectively splitting the Palestinians into two separate entities. The Western-backed Abbas sacked the Hamas-led government in the wake of the takeover and has since repeatedly said he is steadfastly opposed to any dialogue with Hamas until it returns the Gaza Strip to his authority. But Meshaal said: “We have not taken Gaza in order to give it back to them... We have defended our legitimacy against ‘warlords’ who were preparing a coup with the help of the Americans and the Israelis.”