Head of Arab Israeli party Ra’am urges aid be allowed into Gaza, calls on Hamas to free hostages

Mansour Abbas, head of the Islamist Ra’am party, calls on the government to immediately enable humanitarian aid to civilians in the besieged Gaza Strip, while urging the Hamas terror group to release the some 200 hostages kidnapped from Israel on October 7.

“I called on Saturday [October 7] and I’ll continue to call on the groups in Gaza to release those held by them,” Abbas says, outside his Knesset faction meeting.

In addition, he recommends that the government “approve immediate humanitarian assistance” to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Many Arab citizens of Israel are deeply critical of Israel’s actions against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and tensions typically flare up during wartime.

Ten days into the war, Abbas says that “Arab citizens are exercising exemplary restraint” during Israel’s ongoing bombardment of terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

During Israel’s last major flare-up in the Gaza Strip, in May 2021, riots broke out across Arab-Jewish mixed cities, a new and deadly phenomenon that terrified the nation.

Abbas has walked a careful line in Hebrew media, denouncing both Hamas’s kidnapping of mainly civilian hostages from Israel and violence harming Palestinian citizens, without touching on the war’s stated goal: toppling the Hamas terror group’s rule over Gaza.

Instead, focusing on shared pain in the wake of the deadliest single terror attack ever suffered by Israel, Abbas shared that “only an hour ago I was shocked to learn that one of my friends lost his daughter at the Re’im party on Shabbat.” There were several Arab victims in Hamas’s onslaught, particularly from Bedouin communities.