Hamas goal is to expel Israel from West Bank, says top official in rare international interview
Gianluca Pacchiani is the Arab affairs reporter for The Times of Israel
Saleh al-Arouri, the head of the Hamas terror group’s West Bank operations, gives a rare interview to a news outlet that isn’t affiliated with his or other jihadist groups, telling the Qatar-based Al Jazeera website that the group’s current political goal is to expel Israel from the West Bank by means of attacks.
“The resistance is not merely an expression of anger at the occupation, but rather it has a political goal,” al-Arouri, who also serves as the terror group’s deputy political chief, says in a transcript provided by the Hamas-affiliated Shehab news outlet. He later explains this goal to be the expulsion of the “occupation” authorities from the West Bank.
Al-Arouri also boasts that the group today constitutes the backbone of the Palestinian “resistance,” thanks to its guerrilla operations and its war of attrition in the West Bank, under the steering of its political leadership.
He adds that “today, Hamas is present throughout the West Bank, but it has grown mostly in its northern section due to Israel’s withdrawal from parts of the area in 2005,” referring to the dismantling of four settlements in parallel with the disengagement from Gaza. The northern West Bank, the region of Jenin, Nablus and Tulkarem, is the area where the highest level of coordination takes place between Hamas’s armed wing, the al-Qassam brigades, and other factions, al-Arouri notes.
He adds that Israel’s aim to “restore deterrence through killings is delusional,” citing the example of the Jenin refugee camp, which was destroyed in 2002 and today is a hotbed of Palestinian terror activity.
Al-Arouri slams the United States for its “attempts to dismantle the resistance and protecting the Zionist project” and criticizes successive Israeli governments for not having the “courage” to conclude a prisoner exchange with the terror group, stating that Israel “continues to lie to the families of the soldiers when it says that it is making every effort to determine their fate.”
The terror group in Gaza currently holds two living Israelis — Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed — as well as the bodies of two Israeli soldiers, Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin.
