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Wed, Aug 25, 2010 | The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center

Khaled Mashaal in Damascus speaking at a charity fund-raiser for the holy Muslim month of Ramadan (PALDF, Hamas’ main forum, August 18, 2010)

Hamas Recently Launched a Vicious Media Against the Palestinian Authority

The Internal Palestinian Arena

Senior Hamas figures, among them Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniya, recently launched a vicious media against the Palestinian Authority. The reasons behind it were the increased Palestinian Authority supervision of the mosques in Judea and Samaria during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and its decision to relaunch direct negotiations with Israel.

The following remarks were made in Damascus by Khaled Mashaal, head of the Hamas political bureau, at a charity fund-raiser for Ramadan (Al-Jazeera TV, August 18, 2010):

* Accusing the Palestinian Authority of persecuting clerics: Khaled Mashaal claimed that the Palestinian Authority detained clerics, imams and university teachers, leaving 1,000 mosques in the West Bank without clerics to deliver sermons or muezzins, thereby “plotting against the faith.” In addition, the PA forbade sheikh Hamed Bitawi [a Hamas activist who often incites Palestinians against Israel and the PA] to deliver sermons in the mosques in Nablus. (Ismail Haniya, head of the de facto Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip, made similar remarks on August 16, and called on the residents of the West Bank, first and foremost clerics, to take to the streets and declare their objection to the steps taken by the PA.)

* Calling on the Palestinians in the West Bank and “the rest of Palestine” to rebel against the Palestinian Authority. That was because the PA was “persecuting” and disarming “resistance” activists [i.e., operatives of Hamas and other terrorist organizations]. He wondered “if we [should] believe a leadership which disarms the resistance and blames it, while claiming it wants the territories and Jerusalem.”

* Strong opposition to the Palestinian Authority’s holding negotiations with Israel. He said the PA was “going to [hold] direct and indirect negotiations on the orders of its American master, despite the fact that it was not convinced that any good would come of them.” He also said that the PA obeyed foreign orders even if no force was exerted on it, and in that way it was “stabbing both the people and the resistance in the back.”

* An appeal to the Arab world and the international community to work for the sake of Jerusalem. He asked them to take the example of the “project to break the siege” with flotillas and convoys. He claimed that just as the Palestinians had enlisted the conscience and strength of the world to work for a “just cause” like “breaking the siege,” in the same way the world should be recruited for the “sake of Jerusalem,” because, according to Khaled Mashaal, it was ” the heart of all the problems.”