From the Liveblog of
Saturday, August 16, 2014
Mashaal says war with Israel wasn’t Hamas’s choice
Khaled Meshaal, head of Hamas’s politburo, speaks to Al Jazeera from Doha, Qatar and says that the month-long conflict with Israel was “not a war of choice, not the choice of the Palestinian people, or the choice of Hamas,” blaming Israel and saying it’s only operated out of self-defense.
Concerning the nearly 2,000 Palestinians Hamas’s Health Ministry says died in Operation Protective Edge, Mashaal again blames Israel, saying “it is the Israelis who killed all those, it is them that made 300,000 Palestinians homeless” and “they turned Gaza into a disaster zone.”
“It is the Israeli occupation, only because it wants to gratify its thirst for vengeance from our people in Gaza,” Mashaal says.
He charges that despite Israel’s military might, it “concentrated on killing women and children,” whereas Hamas “has high moral standards” and is only killing Israeli soldiers who entered the Gaza Strip.
“Those who care about the Palestinian blood, we tell them: send suitable weapons to the Palestinian people so they can defend themselves against the Israeli aggression,” the Hamas leader says in an overt appeal for military assistance for an internationally recognized terrorist group.
Mashaal accuses Israel of stalling for time in the indirect negotiations in Cairo and ignoring Palestinian demands, while Hamas seeks to end the war “today, not tomorrow.”
“The Palestinian people will continue their struggle until they end the occupation, the colonization and the siege [on Gaza],” he says.
He speaks at length for nearly a half an hour with the Doha-based channel. The full interview is here.
The Times of Israel Community.