Palestinian Authority (PA) and Fatah President Mahmoud Abbas pledged on Monday evening more punitive measures against the Gaza Strip, which has been under an 11-year-old Israeli blockade.
Abbas claimed that the measures against Gaza were decided “for the protection of the national project and the higher Palestinian interests.”
At the same time, Abbas accused Hamas of carrying out the claimed assassination attempt against PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah in Gaza last Tuesday, stressing that he does not care about the investigations, which started in the wake of the play.
“We do not want them to investigate, we do not want information from them, we do not want anything from them because we know exactly that they, the Hamas movement, were the ones who committed this incident," Abbas told members of the PLO Executive Committee in Ramallah.
In a remarkable distortion of reality, Abbas then claimed that Hamas carried out a “coup” in 2007, and said that this was “not justified.”
At the time, Hamas was the democratically-elected government of the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but Abbas had rejected the 2006 election results and seized control of the PA in Ramallah.
A group within Fatah, the movement headed by Abbas, was funded by Israel and the US to overthrow the Hamas government in Gaza. That coup attempt failed, and Fatah security forces were expelled from Gaza in bitter street fighting.
Hamas condemned in the strongest possible terms Abbas’ speech in Ramallah yesterday as “irresponsible.”
The Islamic Resistance Movement said that it was “surprised at Abbas’ belligerent remarks, which burn bridges, intensify the rift and support Donald Trump’s plan to liquidate the Palestinian national cause.”
It accused Abbas of “working to push the Palestinians in Gaza to bend down [in submission] and trying to undermine their steadfastness at a very dangerous and historic moment.”
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