ZAHAR URGES FATAH TO ABANDON FUTILE PEACE PROCESS

  Prominent Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar has urged Palestinian factions, including Fatah, to abandon the “futile peace process” with Israel and revert to the “way of resistance.”

 “Sustained armed resistance is the only way to liberate Palestine,” said the veteran Islamic leader during a ceremony marking the 23rd anniversary of Hamas’s founding.

 Hamas was founded in 1987 in the Gaza Strip as a reaction to mounting Israeli terrorism and savagery aimed mostly at pushing Palestinians to emigrate and cede their ancestral homeland to Zionist Jews.

 Zahar, who co-founded Hamas along with several other Islamist leaders, including the late Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, burned the Israeli flag as supporters chanted “death to the Israeli occupation” and “death to Zionism.”

 Both Yassin and Rantisi, as well as a large number of Hamas’s founding leaders, were martyred by the Zionist occupation forces.

 A physician by profession, Zahar said Israel had no future in Palestine and its existence will come to an end sooner or later.

 “The Israeli occupation will come to an end; it has no future,” he said. “Our principles and constants are not subject to human reasoning; our land is sacred and holy and our rights are not subject to referenda or elections or bargaining or compromise or sale.”

 Zahar was seemingly responding to recent rumours that Hamas might be prompted to recognize Israel in exchange for the creation of an independent Palestinian State in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

 Zahar said Hamas’s hands were being extended to other Palestinian groups for national unity.

 “Our hands are extended to you; don’t let us down. We also call on the Arabs to utilize their armies for the liberation of Palestine or at least stop guarding Israel’s borders.”

 “We are not your enemies; your real enemies are those who would want to see your soldiers killed needlessly in futile and pointless wars in Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan.”

 He also urged the Palestinian Authority security apparatus to free detained resistance fighters from PA lockups.