(RightWing.org) – The Sunni Islamist group Hamas carried out the most deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust during the first week of October. After roughly a month-and-a-half of fighting, the terrorist organization indicated it wanted to negotiate with Israeli officials.
On December 13, Hamas’ politburo head and senior political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, gave a televised speech on Al-Aqsa TV, a Gaza-based network run by Hamas. He said that the Sunni Islamist group was open to negotiating a settlement to end its deadly war with Israel. But, he warned that any agreement that did not include Hamas in postwar Gaza involved delusional thinking.
Continuing, Haniyeh indicated an interest in “putting the Palestinian house in order” in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,” a reference to the group’s mixed leadership of those regions with the Palestinian Authority. He said he envisioned creating a political pathway that would secure the “right of the Palestinian people to [an] independent state” with its capital located in Jerusalem.
Conspicuously, Haniyeh didn’t make any note of the presence of an Israeli state. However, taking that implied position wasn’t unexpected considering Hamas’ longstanding goal of seeking Israel’s destruction, backed by a vow to carry out repeated attacks like the one launched in early October until the group achieves that goal.
Later that day, another prominent member of Hamas’ politburo, Moussa Abu Marzouk, struck a different tone when talking to Al-Monitor, a US-based news site owned by an Arab American entrepreneur. He suggested that Hamas should follow the “official stance” laid out in the US-brokered Oslo Accords, two agreements signed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel in the mid-1990s.
Those agreements laid out a pathway for peace and aimed to secure the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination under two United Nations Security Council resolutions. During negotiations, the PLO recognized the State of Israel, and Israelis acknowledged the PLO as the official representative of the Palestinian people.
It remains unclear if other members of Hamas backed Marzoak’s position, recognizing the Israeli state.
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