DAMASCUS/JERUSALEM, 28 August 2007 — A US-sponsored international conference on Israeli-Palestinian peace is doomed to fail because it will serve only Israel’s interests, Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal said in a CNN interview broadcast yesterday. Calling the gathering, expected in November, “a meeting controlled and directed by (US Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice,” Meshaal, who lives in exile in Damascus, said neither Israel nor the United States was serious about achieving peace.
“There is no doubt that the outcome will be leaning toward Israel’s best interest because (Israeli Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert is the stronger side in the negotiations,” Meshaal said, according to CNN’s translation of his comments in Arabic. “All these reasons are going to lead to a failure,” said Meshaal, who was injected with poison by Israeli agents in Jordan in 1997 but was saved by an antidote sent from Israel after his attackers were overpowered and arrested.
Hamas Islamists, who took control of the Gaza Strip in June, have rejected Western calls to recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept existing interim Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. Leaders of Hamas, whose 1988 founding charter calls for the Jewish state’s destruction, have offered a long-term truce with Israel in return for a viable Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
“The American administration is fighting Hamas and working on isolating it,” Meshaal said in the interview, which CNN reported was held in a heavily guarded Hamas safe house in the Syrian capital.
But Meshaal said Washington, which supports Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, would eventually realize it would have to deal with Hamas for the sake of Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Meanwhile, Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned yesterday that Hezbollah is rearming out of reach of UN peacekeepers following last year’s war between the Jewish state and the Shiite guerrillas.
“Hezbollah is continuing its rearmament process. Hezbollah today has more medium— and long-range rockets than it had before the start of the war,” a Barak aide quoted the minister as telling lawmakers behind closed doors. “It has also obtained a considerable number of anti-tank rockets,” of the kind that proved deadly against Israeli tanks during the 34-day war.
A senior Israeli minister accused Egypt yesterday of allowing tons of explosives and weapons to reach the Gaza Strip, charging that Cairo had an interest in seeing a “strong Hamas.” “The Egyptians can take immediate and decisive steps to stop it (the alleged arms smuggling) but haven’t done this over the past seven years,” Public Security Minister Avi Dichter told army radio.
