Hamas will ‘shut down’ US embassy in Israel, co-founder of terror group warns
Mahmoud al-Zahar says Trump ‘works for Jews’ and ‘lives in Jewish home’, threatens to ‘deport all the people of your kind’
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
A co-founder and leader of the Hamas terror organization has warned US President Donald Trump that once Hamas has “liberated Palestine in its entirety… we will shut down your embassy, and deport all the people of your kind.”
During an interview broadcast on December 17 and translated Monday by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Mahmoud al-Zahar told Al-Jazeera TV that the US would “suffer from the future geopolitical circumstances” because Islam would expand beyond all expectations.
“Right now, you are working for the Jews,” he said. “Trump’s own home is a Jewish home.”
Once Palestine had been taken, “annihilation” would be “the fate not only of the Jews, but also of their helpers and of the people who trusted them, cooperated with them,” he went on.
In a move that delighted much of Israel’s leadership but ignited protests across the Muslim world, Trump announced on December 6 that the US recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and planned to move its embassy there from Tel Aviv.
Asked whether Hamas would ever agree to cede its weapons to the Palestinian Authority under a new power-sharing agreement, Zahhar said, “The answer is no — a no as big as the planet Earth. Not a single weapon will be handed over….We will not relinquish a single gun, not even a single bullet.”
On Thursday, Hamas’s Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar, said that the Palestinian reconciliation process was falling apart over a dispute about the future of the terror group’s weapons.
An Egypt-brokered agreement in early October originally set a December 1 deadline for Hamas to fully transfer power in the Gaza Strip back to the Palestinian Authority, which is dominated by PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, though that was later pushed back to December 10.
Abbas wants the PA to be in full control of all weapons and security in the Gaza Strip, but Hamas is refusing to give up its extensive arsenal.
Hamas, which seeks the destruction of Israel, has fought three wars with the Jewish state since seizing power from Fatah in the enclave in 2007.
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