Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News writes in “How Hamas Sees the Current Moment: An Exclusive Interview With Osama Hamdan“: “Over the weekend, Netanyahu vowed to intensify Israeli attacks in the coming weeks and to expand the army’s ground operations inside Gaza. On Monday, Israel’s cabinet approved a plan to seize large areas of the Gaza Strip where Israeli forces would remain entrenched indefinitely. Code-named Gideon’s Chariots, the operations would also reportedly include forcibly displacing Palestinians into small areas of southern Gaza. An Israeli security official told YNet the details of the plan were revealed as a pressure campaign to force Hamas to accept a short term truce agreement that would result in the release of large numbers of Israeli captives without agreeing to end the war. …
“Hamdan and the other Hamas official told Drop Site that the meetings with Boehler were meant to lead to direct talks with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and the administration’s lead negotiator. Hamas believes Israel succeeded in derailing those meetings. ‘We expect more from Trump’s administration, not just to keep the security of Israel, not just to listen to the Israeli side. All the world, mainly the United States administration, has to listen to the Palestinians. You have to listen to their side of the story,’ he said. ‘You can’t solve it just by listening to Netanyahu who is lying to his own people, not only lying to the Americans or lying to the Arabs, he’s lying [to] his own people.’” See post by Drop Site News on Netanyahu’s record, including claiming he had no intention of displacing Palestinians.
Scahill writes: “Over the past 19 months, Western media outlets have done very little in depth reporting on the perspective of Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions. These movements are often portrayed in a cartoonish manner as irrational terrorists who want to kill for the sake of killing. When they are interviewed by Western outlets, it is either to quote a sentence or two responding to allegations made by Israel or the U.S. or to relitigate the events of October 7.
“We believe that this failure by Western media outlets to seek to understand the perspective of Hamas and other Palestinian groups is not just journalistic malpractice, but is a fundamental disservice to the public understanding of one of the bloodiest campaigns of annihilation against a people in modern history. A war of annihilation that is being funded, armed, and promoted by the U.S. and other Western powers.”
Listen to Scahill’s interview with the Hamas leader here; he asks about disarming Hamas and all Palestinian groups in Gaza: “Hamas has said not just that this is a red line, but that it’s a million red lines.” Hamdan replied: “This issue was not on the table of the negotiations all the last 10 months. … We are not fighting just because we like to fight or it’s a good idea to fight others. We are not fighting the Israelis because, for example, they are Jewish people. … We are fighting to be liberated from the occupation. If that can happen in a political way, well, this is good. … What about the Israeli weapons?”
Hamdan also stated: “What the Israelis are offering is: We will give you a ceasefire for a short while and then we will come back to kill you again. So what’s the idea of giving you food for 12, 40 days, two weeks or three weeks and then coming back to kill you? It means that you endorse the genocide and you accept that for your own people.”
HELENACOBBAN, [email protected], [email protected], @helenacobban
Cobban is co-editor of Understanding Hamas and president of Just World Educational. She recalled that in 1982, “a previous U.S. government concluded an agreement with the leaders of the PLO under which they took all their fighters out of Beirut on the basis of U.S. assurances for the well-being of the Palestinian civilians left behind in Beirut. But just a few weeks after the PLO fighters left, Israel’s defense minister Ariel Sharon worked with local Phalangist militias to orchestrate a massacre of Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.” Her previous books include The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power and Politics from Cambridge University Press.
She added: “Washington is a very non-credible mediator of the terrible atrocities and conflict that Gaza’s people are currently undergoing. At this point, only determined action by the UN can force an end to Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza and to Washington’s complete collusion in those actions.”
See accuracy.org news release: “Beyond U.S. Isolation at UN: What’s Not Being Done” and piece by IPA’s Sam Husseini: “‘Uniting for Peace’ is Next Step in Invoking Genocide Convention Process to Protect Palestine.”