“Resistance is the right of the people”: in Gaza, Hamas refuses to surrender its weapons

A Hamas leader, Khaled Mechaal, affirms this Sunday that the Palestinian Islamist movement will not give up its weapons. He will also refuse any foreign domination of the Gaza Strip, despite calls to disarm by Israel and the United States.

“Criminalizing the resistance, its weapons and those who led it is something we should not accept,” Khaled Mechaal said at a conference in Doha (Qatar). He adds that arming Hamas is an integral part of the “resistance” against Israel in the Palestinian territories.

“As long as there is an occupation, there is resistance. Resistance is the right of people under occupation (…) It is something that nations are proud of,” adds Khaled Mechaal, former head of Hamas’s political office who currently heads the movement’s diaspora office.

Still 20,000 fighters

After the implementation of a ceasefire on October 10, US President Donald Trump’s plan to definitively end the war between Israel and Hamas entered its second phase in mid-January. It provides in particular for the disarmament of the movement and the gradual withdrawal of the Israeli army from Gaza. But Hamas, which has ruled the territory since 2007, has made its disarmament a red line, while not excluding handing over its weapons to a future authority in the hands of the Palestinians.

According to Israeli officials, the Islamist movement still has 20,000 fighters and tens of thousands of weapons in Gaza. The governance of the territory, ravaged by two years of war, must be entrusted in a transitional phase to a committee of fifteen Palestinian technocrats, under the authority of the “Peace Council” chaired by Donald Trump.

Khaled Mechaal on Sunday called on the “Peace Council” to adopt a “balanced approach” that would allow the reconstruction of Gaza and the influx of humanitarian aid, while warning that Hamas would not accept “foreign domination”. “We adhere to our national principles and reject the logic of trusteeship, any external intervention or the return of a mandate in any form,” he declared. “Palestinians must be governed by Palestinians. Gaza belongs to the people of Gaza and to Palestine. We will not accept foreign domination. »