‘We Have A Right To Confront The Occupiers’

Hamas won’t remain idle “in the face of a Zionist escalation” in the Gaza Strip. “We will defend, with our utmost force, any new Zionist aggression against the Gaza Strip,” the Islamic resistance group said in a statement on Sunday announcing that it had reached agreement with other Palestinian groups to stop firing rockets and missiles at Israel, “to preserve the internal front.”

The armed wing of Hamas, Ezzeddine Al-Qassam, said that the decision “was not taken out of weakness, but out of a keenness to preserve the internal front and national interests of the Palestinians.”

The Hamas interior minister, Fathi Hammad, said his government would not take any measures to stop the attacks on Israel unless all the Palestinian groups reached an agreement to declare a cease-fire.

He said that the Palestinian groups, including Hamas, maintained the right to respond if and when Israel invades the Gaza Strip again.

Despite Hamas’s announcement that Palestinian resistance groups have agreed to halt the attacks on the occupied territories, two factions in the Gaza Strip said they were not aware of any agreement in this regard.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine strongly denied that its members were part of a cease-fire agreement. The group’s armed wing, the Abu Ali Mutapha Brigades, said it remained committed to the “option of confrontation and resistance against the occupation in all forms.”

Islamic Jihad also denied that it had agreed to stop attacks on the Israeli settlements. A spokesman for the organization in the Gaza Strip said he did not know of any Egyptian-brokered cease-fire agreement.

The spokesman said that it was inconceivable that the Palestinians would agree to stop the “resistance” while Israel was continuing its “aggression” against the Palestinians.

“We stick to our right to confront the occupiers for as long as they are on our Palestinian lands,” he said. “We won’t accept the principle of security for security. The enemy will leave only through resistance.”

Notes/Sources:
1.JPost