A senior Hamas terrorist told a Lebanese news outlet, which the allied jihadist group Hezbollah operates, on Thursday that his group would offer “no compromise” on the destruction of Israel, describing the Jewish state as having “no future in the region.”
Osama Hamdan, the top Hamas representative in Lebanon, threatened all who support the existence of Israel, telling Hezbollah’s al-Manar news, “Whoever counts on it or attaches their future to it will lose.”
Hamdan’s comments echo the ideological provisions of the Hamas terrorist charter and statements made since 2023 by officials in Iran, the world’s premier state sponsor of terrorism and a top Hamas financier. The opposition among jihadist groups to Israel existing in peace presents a significant obstacle to the foreign policy of leftist American President Joe Biden, whose officials have been repeating, with increasing frequency and urgency, the need for an alleged “two-state solution” in which a sovereign “Palestine” is established alongside Israel. Those proposing two states have not offered any clarity on who would govern such a state — an issue of particular concern given that Hamas is the government of the “Palestinian” territory of Gaza.
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Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart NewsHamdan’s remarks, as sympathetic observers online translated, included a condemnation of the United States as well, accusing Washington, DC, of being “responsible for all the conflicts taking place in the region.”
Hamas leaders have done little to obscure their objective of destroying the state of Israel since their invasion and mass murder spree on October 7. The occasion was the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the country, killing an estimated 1,200 people and resulting in the abduction of about 250 others, of which about half have been liberated. Hamas terrorists engaged in door-to-door mass killings in residential communities, in some cases executing all members of a family, sometimes in their beds, and on other occasions torturing, gang-raping, and mutilating victims. Hamas refers to the terrorist attack as the “al-Quds flood” and celebrates it as a battle victory.
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Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart NewsMahmoud al-Zahar, another top Hamas official, said shortly after October 7 that the organization was seeking to eradicate Israel, Judaism, and “treacherous Christianity,” predicting a global victory for jihad.
The allied government of Iran, which celebrated the mass killings on October 7 by holding a street party in Tehran, has also repeatedly asserted that it had no interest in a “two-state solution” because Iran did not support Israel’s right to exist. Speaking at a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in November, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi declared that Tehran had a “clear opinion” in which it “always regarded the Zionist regime [Israel] as a fake, usurping, and identity-less regime.” Raisi explicitly rejected the proposition of two states co-existing.
Iranians attend a gathering in Tehran to express their solidarity with Palestinians after Hamas militants launched a deadly air, land, and sea assault into Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, in Tehran, Iran. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
“Israel is occupying the Palestinian land, and we believe that a two-state solution will not help to resolve the Palestinian issue,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said in December.
Mohsen Rezaei, a member of the Iranian Expediency Council, similarly declared, “Talking about two states is over.”
“The era of normalizing relations (with Israel) has ended, and a new order will be created in the region,” he continued. “An international anti-Zionist movement will awaken in the world … This movement will be created across the nations due to the tremendous crimes that took place — even Hitler did not do such things.”
The “tremendous crimes” Rezaei referred to are not those Hamas committed on October 7 but a reference to Israel’s self-defense operation in Gaza against Hamas following the massacre.
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The clear demands of the aggressors in the conflict to destroy Israel have had little impact on the Biden foreign policy plan. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spent much of February touring the Middle East, including a final stop in Israel, proclaiming Biden’s “commitment” to a “two-state solution.” In Egypt, Blinken “emphasized the United States’ … commitment to establishing a Palestinian state that provides peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians alike” in talks with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
In Qatar, the nation that has hosted Hamas’s “political office” for years and brokered communications with the terrorist group, Blinken again told the emir there that America had a “commitment to establishing durable peace in the Middle East, including the establishment of a Palestinian state that ensures security for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
Blinken told reporters in Doha that Biden sought to create a situation in which Israel’s belligerent neighbors “integrated” the country into the region “alongside a practical, timebound, irreversible path to a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel, with the necessary security arrangements for both peoples.”
The Emirati newspaper the National observed on Friday that Blinken left his Mideast tour “empty-handed,” as Israel rejected an alleged “truce” proposal from Hamas that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “delusional.” Blinken had diplomatically admitted the Hamas proposal included “non-starters.”
“The counter-proposals include Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, a permanent ceasefire, and a reconstruction plan with a three-year timeline. They also envisage a prisoner and hostage swap between Israel and Hamas,” the National reported.
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