GAZA CITY, 4 November 2007 — Hamas supremo Khaled Meshaal said yesterday that he welcomed talks with the movement’s Fatah rivals but would not “beg,” according to a statement posted on a Hamas website. “We open our doors to a national dialogue and a solution to internal conflicts because we believe in the importance and the necessity and the need of the Palestinian people for this, but we will not beg,” Meshaal said.
Meshaal, who heads the Islamist movement’s powerful political office in Syria, went on to warn Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas against attending an international peace meeting expected in the United States later this year.
Hamas has repeatedly said that the meeting — aimed at reviving peace negotiations with Israel, which have been dormant since 2000 — is a US and Israeli ploy to normalize relations with Arab states. “(US President George W.) Bush is not trustworthy, and he wants to save himself from his failure in Iraq... There is no political horizon, the only real horizon is in unity between Hamas and Fatah,” Meshaal said.
The organizers of the conference “want nothing but normalization with the Arabs, and they will do nothing but increase Arab and internal divisions to prepare for new assaults against Iran and Syria, and Lebanon and Gaza.” His comments came a day after Abbas met Hamas members in the West Bank for the first time since the Islamists seized power in Gaza after routing his forces in a week of bloody street battles in June.
Abbas moved to downplay the meeting, however, insisting that he would not engage in any kind of real dialogue with the movement until it returned Gaza to his control. “The president told them that no dialogue could take place until Hamas backtracks and renounces what it acquired in its illegal coup,” his office said on Friday. Israel has warned that any kind of rapprochement with the Islamists could endanger current peace efforts, and Washington is likely to take a similar position, having blacklisted Hamas as a terror group. Mohammed Mar’i adds from Ramallah:
Fearing from clandestine Hamas preparation to takeover the West Bank takeover, Israeli forces established new security unit aims to uncover group’s giant financial apparatus. The new unit set up by the Israeli forces is supposed to somehow map Hamas’ civilian infrastructure, attempt to monitor the flow of funds, and cut it off.
Some of the incriminating material is meant to be presented to foreign governments so that they outlaw charity foundations operating in their territory. These things were already done in the past, but not at such intensity. According to Israeli security sources, the new unit established by the Israeli forces’ Central Command, which controls the West Bank, has neither a name nor a number at this time. What they do have, for now, is a grey stone building packed with piles of crates filled with papers, waiting to be translated, reviewed, and classified.
Meanwhile, the Israeli cabinets are packed with confiscated computer parts. All the material in this building was gathered at various West Bank offices during the nightly raids undertaken by Israeli troops at least three of four times a week at Palestinian mosques, villages, and towns.
For now, there are 20 Arabic-Hebrew translators in this unit. But everyone knows this unit will be growing and hire dozens more. There is no other choice: Gaza was already overtaken by Hamas, and unless something drastic is done, a West Bank takeover is only a matter of time.
The Israeli sources said that the initial examination of the seemingly innocent material, which was mostly confiscated at charity foundations and mosques, produces a scary picture: A giant octopus that controls hundreds of millions of dollars coming in from all over the world — an apparatus that looks exactly like the one that led to Hamas’ Gaza takeover within several days is also up and running in the West Bank.
A senior Israeli military source characterized it this week: “We still don’t know how much we don’t know in all matters pertaining to Hamas’ true power in the West Bank.”
