Thursday, September 2, 2010

Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya told tens of thousands of Hamas supporters that his group remains committed to the elim-ination of Israel, on the 22nd anniversary of its founding.

“We will never give up on Palestine from the river to the sea,” Haniya told the crowd, referring to the pre-1948 borders of the British Palestine Mandate between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

“It is not enough for Hamas to liberate Gaza, nor to establish an emirate in Gaza, nor a state, nor an independent entity... Hamas strives to liberate all
of Palestine.”

Supporters carried large green banners and portraits of Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound cleric who founded and led the group until he was killed in an Israeli air strike in 2004.

“In the 22 years since its founding, Hamas has been able to realise a large part of its goals and to overcome every obstacle it has faced, from prison, exile, assassinations and elections,” senior Hamas leader Mahmud Zahar said.

“Our understanding of the resistance is total, and is not limited to armed conflict,” he added in an interview with a news web site close to the smaller and more radical Islamic Jihad faction.

Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, which was responsible for scores of deadly attacks and suicide bombings in Israel, praised the group’s military evolution.

“We have been able to build an army for resistance and to haunt the Zionist enemy,” he said in a statement on a Qassam-linked web site.

“(The Qassam Brigades) has manufactured its weapons with its bare hands... including the Qassam rocket, which terrifies the Zionist enemy,” he added, referring to the makeshift and rarely lethal rockets the group fired at Israel before declaring a ceasefire after last winter’s Gaza war.

Hamas was founded in 1987 shortly after the beginning of the first intifada, or uprising, against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.