A senior Hamas official, Khaled Meshaal (pictured), said today that the Palestinian Islamist organization will not give up its weapons and will reject any foreign rule in the Gaza Strip, despite calls for disarmament from Israel and the United States.
"The criminalization of the resistance and its weapons and those who use them is something we should not accept," Khaled Meshaal said at a conference in Doha, adding that Hamas' weapons are an integral part of the "resistance" against Israel in the Palestinian territories.
“As long as there is occupation, there is resistance. Resistance is the right of the occupied peoples… It is something that nations are proud of,” said Meshaal, a former head of Hamas’s political bureau who is currently in charge of the organization’s diaspora office.
After the implementation of the ceasefire on October 10, US President Donald Trump's plan, which aims to finally end the war between Israel and Hamas, entered its second phase in mid-January, which envisages the disarmament of the organization and the progressive withdrawal of the Israeli army from Gaza.
However, Hamas, which has ruled the enclave since 2007, has made disarmament a red line, without ruling out handing over its weapons to a future Palestinian authority.
According to Israeli officials, the Islamist organization still has 20,000 fighters and tens of thousands of weapons in Gaza.
The governance of the territory will be entrusted, in a transitional phase, to a committee of 15 Palestinian technocrats, under the supervision of Donald Trump's "Peace Council".
Khaled Meshaal today called on the "Peace Council" to adopt a "balanced approach" that will allow the reconstruction of Gaza and the flow of humanitarian aid, warning, however, that Hamas will not accept "foreign domination."
"Palestinians should be governed by Palestinians. Gaza belongs to the people of Gaza and Palestine. We will not accept foreign rule," he said.
