Israel went on the offensive, both militarily and in propaganda terms, on January 9 after a Hamas operation inside 1948 Palestine (Israel) in which 4 Israeli soldiers were killed and two Hamas activists martyred. Israeli soldiers responded by demolishing 73 homes in nearby Ghazzah, according to the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), making 123 families — adding up to more than 800 people — homeless.
Hamas announced on December 21 that it was suspending martyrdom operations inside “the land occupied in 1948.” The announcement, in a notice issued in Ghazzah, came after weeks of intensified Israeli military pressure on Palestinians aimed at making life unbearable for civilians, and at forcing the Palestinian Authority to crack down on Islamic groups on Israel’s behalf.
The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) has been the mainstay of the al-Aqsa Intifada in Palestine. In this issue, we reprint two recent communiqués explaining their approach to the conduct of the Islamic resistance struggle to the Zionist occupation of Palestine.
Hamas: Political Thought and Practice by Khalid Hroub. Pub: Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington DC, USA, 2000, pp. 329, $16.95.
Khalid Misha’al is Head of the Political Bureau of Hamas, the main Palestinian Islamic movement. He represented Hamas at the International Conference on the Palestinian Intifada in Tehran last month as Hamas leader Shaikh Ahmad Yasin was unable to travel to Iran from Occupied Ghazzah. Here we present an excerpt of his address to the conference.
Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic movement which is the most popular political group among Palestinians, and is also the leading critic and opponent of the ‘peace process’, suffered a major blow on August 30, when the Jordanian government closed down its offices in Amman.
Thanks to western propaganda, the Hizbullah are often projected as masked men bradishing submachine guns, not unlike those in the movie, Man in Black. Few people are aware of the Hizbullah’s broad range of activities including social and cultural.
I was invited as a speaker to Al-Quds Day meeting on January 31, 1997, which was part of the Ramadan activities held by Sincan municipality, a district of Ankara. Before the program, I sent the organizers a video cassette exposing the crimes of Zionism and highlighting the Palestinian cause.
By including Harkatul Ansar, a Muslim group battling the Indian occupation army in Kashmir, on the list of ‘terrorist’ organisations, the US has served noticed that it has joined the Hindus’ crusade against Kashmiri Muslims.
