‘We have to reconsider our tools’: Terror chief Zubeidi laments that all Palestinian strategies have failed

In an interview with The New York Times, Zakaria Zubeidi – a well-known Palestinian terrorist freed by Israel this year after being arrested for organizing dozens of attacks during the Second Intifada while heading the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in Jenin – laments the futility of Palestinian attempts to achieve a sovereign state.

“We [the Palestinians] have to reconsider our tools,” Zubeidi, who was released in exchange for hostages kidnapped by Hamas in a January ceasefire deal with the terror group, tells the newspaper in his first major interview since his release.

“We founded a theater, and we tried cultural resistance — what did that do?” he continues, referring to a theater program he recently co-founded in Jenin. “We tried the rifle, we tried shooting. There’s no solution,” he says. According to the paper, Zubeidi feels that “none of it had helped forge a Palestinian state [and] it may never do so.”

He emphasizes that his involvement with the theater was not a transition from or denunciation of armed Palestinian activity, saying: “It’s not about being one thing or another… How did I open the theater door? I broke it with my rifle.”

During the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, Zubeidi “joined a militia in Jenin in the belief that it was the best way of achieving Palestinian sovereignty,” according to the interview, eventually becoming the head of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.

Zubeidi denies involvement in any murder, according to the newspaper, though Israel held him responsible for ordering several attacks that resulted in multiple deaths, including of civilians, and for 24 offenses, mostly related to violence. Zubeidi was also among six prisoners who escaped from Gilboa prison in 2021, before being recaptured days later.

Zubeidi also says that he lost his teeth and was repeatedly beaten by Israeli guards during his imprisonment, though the Israel Prison Service denies this and similar claims from other releasees in a statement to The New York Times, saying it is “not aware of the claims [described], and as far as we know, no such events have occurred.”

Upon witnessing, after his release, Israel’s strikes on Gaza during the current war, as well as the aftermath of Israeli raids in the West Bank, Zubeidi assesses that “on every front, Palestinian strategies seem to be failing,” according to the paper. Zubeidi’s son was also among five Palestinian gunmen killed in an Israeli strike on the West Bank last year.

Zubeidi claims that “there is no peaceful solution and there is no military solution” for Palestinians, “because the Israelis don’t want to give us anything.”

“It’s impossible to uproot us from here,” he continues, “and we don’t have any tools to uproot them.”