 |
| Dr. Mohammed Al-Hindi, the deputy secretary general and chief political negotiator for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Photo by Jeremy In an exclusive interview with Drop Site, Mohammed Al-Hindi of Palestinian Islamic Jihad said Israel is deluding itself into believing it can defeat the Palestinian cause. |
A senior leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad—the second largest armed resistance movement fighting in Gaza—told Drop Site News that no more Israeli captives will be freed unless the U.S. and regional mediators force Israel to agree to a ceasefire deal that includes the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces and an end to its military assault on the Strip.
“We are not surrendering this single card in the hands of the resistance,” said Mohammed Al-Hindi, the deputy secretary general and chief political negotiator of PIJ, referring to the 59 Israel captives—living and dead—held in Gaza. “The condition of the resistance is: We are prepared to implement a comprehensive deal—the release of all captives held in Gaza in exchange for an end to the war and withdrawal.”
While Hamas is leading the indirect negotiations with Israel for a Gaza deal, Palestinian Islamic Jihad is consulted before any formal responses are given to the mediators from Qatar and Egypt.
Al-Hindi said that while Hamas and PIJ prefer a comprehensive “all for all” deal, they remain open to a framework that “could be implemented in phases—a comprehensive and clear deal, but implemented in phases, to accommodate some of the tensions within Israel.”
Since the early 1980s, Al-Hindi has been a central figure in Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He is a pediatrician by training and early in his career worked at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. Al-Hindi was jailed for a year during the First Intifada and has been imprisoned several times by both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. In 2004, Israeli helicopters fired several missiles at Al-Hindi’s office in Gaza in what was widely believed to be an assassination attempt. Al-Hindi is the chief of PIJ’s political department and the top deputy to its secretary general, Ziyad Al-Nakhalah.
Al-Hindi led PIJ’s delegation in talks that resulted in a May 2023 Egyptian-brokered ceasefire between the group and Israel. It was the culmination of fighting that began in August 2022 when Israel assassinated several senior PIJ officials in Gaza. The movement’s armed wing, Saraya Al Quds, retaliated with rocket attacks. Israel, in turn, pummeled Gaza with air strikes and conducted raids in the occupied West Bank. During that conflict, Hamas did not participate, though it praised PIJ for “defending the Palestinian people.” Al-Hindi and several senior Hamas officials said that relations between Hamas and PIJ are now stronger than ever.
In an exclusive two-hour in-person interview with Drop Site, Al-Hindi said that in the two months since Israel unilaterally withdrew from the ceasefire deal signed in January and guaranteed by the United States, Israel has flooded Qatar and Egypt, the regional mediators on the deal, with a wave of new demands it knows Hamas and other resistance groups would reject. Among these was the total disarmament of not just Hamas, but the entire Gaza Strip, as well as the expulsion of Palestinian resistance leaders from the enclave.
“The biggest problem for the Israelis is the issue of weapons. Disarmament is an issue that no one can accept, neither the resistance nor the Palestinian people,” Al-Hindi said. “If the resistance ends with the surrender of weapons, they will implement the forced displacement of [Palestinians out of] Gaza.”
A recent draft proposal presented to Hamas by Egyptian mediators, which was obtained by Drop Site, also allowed for the indefinite presence of Israeli forces inside Gaza and no clearly defined path to a long term truce. “What Israel was attempting to achieve through negotiations was the release of the captives held by the resistance, without ending the war,” he said. “It was as if [Israel] was saying, ‘The people of Gaza and the resistance in Gaza are sentenced to death, but we want to return the captives in order to carry out this sentence.’”
A new public opinion poll, conducted by the independent Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, found significant support in both Gaza and the West Bank for Hamas’s negotiating stance. “The overwhelming majority of Palestinians believe that the war will not end and Israel will not withdraw from the Gaza Strip if Hamas agrees to disarm,” the poll, released on May 5, concluded. “Similarly, the overwhelming majority disagree with the view that if Hamas releases the hostages, Israel will end the war and withdraw from the Gaza Strip.”
Al-Hindi said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promises that Hamas will be eliminated and that the Palestinian resistance would surrender is fantasy. He said the genocide in Gaza and the intensifying ethnic cleansing operations in the West Bank may appear as tactical successes for Netanyahu’s careerlong agenda to erase the Palestinians, but that focusing on the past 19 months conceals the fires yet to come.
“Resistance is in the DNA of the Palestinian people—they will not surrender,” Al-Hindi said. “There may come a day when Israel finds itself longing for Hamas. The anger that has accumulated among the people is immense and it could explode at any moment. And it’s not just among the Palestinian people, but also among the people of the region and the free people of the world. There is anger, great anger. Israel no longer holds a monopoly on the image of the victim—it has come to be seen as the executioner. These issues, arrogance and pride, sometimes blind people and prevent them from seeing reality and acting rationally.”
Al-Hindi believes Netanyahu wants to seize the entire Gaza Strip, as Israel formally announced its intent to do this week, and to expel the Palestinians from the territory and that international condemnations, international court rulings, and arrest warrants have had no impact in deterring this agenda. “Israel is influenced only by internal factors and the U.S. administration,” Al-Hindi said, pointing to mounting public pressure inside of Israel to make a deal that frees the Israeli captives. “This creates a problem for the Israeli government: how can it retrieve the captives without entering [Gaza] and searching for them? And if the army enters, it will suffer losses while conducting this search,” he said. “That's why they resort to bombing with aircrafts and tanks. They bomb areas, but they don't retrieve captives.”
Al-Hindi said that while he is certain Hamas’s negotiators will not enter into an agreement that fails to halt the genocide, he predicted Israel will ultimately be pressured to make concessions. Netanyahu’s war aims may cause problems for Trump’s regional agenda and the U.S. president’s desire to be seen as a deal maker who can end Biden-era wars.
There is also mounting unrest among the Israeli public and widespread demands to make a deal to free the remaining captives. “I believe that internal pressure within Israel, as well as the U.S. administration, which can exert some pressure, may result in an agreement, even if only partially,” he said. “Trump made many promises, whether regarding the war in Gaza and stopping it or the war in Ukraine and stopping it, but he has not fulfilled any of his promises so far.”
Please go here to continue this article: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/islamic-jihad-hamas-gaza-trump-middle-east-israel-ceasefire-saudi-humanitarian-aid
No comments:
Post a Comment