International community must bridle aggression

Ismael Haneyya, the Palestinian prime minister has asserted Tuesday that his government was carefully following up the recent Israeli military escalation against the besieged Gaza Strip, but he ruled out another full scale Israeli aggression on the Strip.

He also called on the international community to carryout its mandate to bridle the Israeli atrocities against the Palestinian civilians, adding the Israeli occupation was dragging the entire region to instability although he describe the Israeli threats to invade Gaza as psychological warfare.

However, Haneyya stressed the right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves, calling the Palestinian factions to enhance the national harmony, and to work together to protect the Palestinian people and to defend their national interests.

Furthermore, Haneyya pointed out that his government decided to open an investigation to know what happened at the Rafah crossing point that separates Gaza form Egypt, and which Egypt had been closing since 40 months, thus tightening the siege on Gaza and aggravating the suffering of the 1.5 million inhabitants living there.

“We have decided to open an investigation over the Rafah incidents to discover the truth and to take all the necessary measure to protect the Palestinian-Egyptian relationship”, Haneyya underlined, adding that disappointment engulfing the Gaza inhabitants of the Egyptian steel wall would be taken into consideration in the investigation.

But he criticized the unjustified smearing campaign of the official media outlets in Egypt against the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian people after the death of the Egyptian soldier at the hands of his comrades as Egyptian medical sources revealed, urging the Egyptian authorities to halt such media attacks, and to solve issues away from such unprecedented fanaticism against the Palestinian people.

For his part, MP Salah Al-Bardaweel of Hamas’s parliamentary bloc in the PLC, rebuked the statement of Egyptian foreign affairs minister Ahmed Abu Al-Ghait calling on Hamas Movement not to “provoke” the Israeli occupation.

“The Zionist entity doesn’t need an excuse to target and kill the Palestinian people as the Israeli occupation war machinery became adopted to targeting and killing the Palestinian people without reasons”, Bardaweel asserted, revealing that around 16 Palestinian citizens were killed in cold blood with Israeli bullets over the past week.

He stressed that his Movement is a liberation Movement that wants to achieve the Palestinian national aspirations, and that Hamas understands well the nature of its enemy and the rules of the military game.

But he stressed that Hamas and the Palestinian people possess strong will and determination, and strong patience and steadfastness, and that it would continue struggle till the Palestinian national goals are achieved.

He also deprecated Abu Al-Ghait’s claims that Egypt knows the identity of the Egyptian soldier’s killers, describing such allegations as “strange and premature”.

“We have made it clear that our only enemy is the Israeli occupation and not Egypt and the Egyptian people at all, and we urged the Egyptian officials to open an investigation on the Rafah clashes”, Bardaweel underscored, citing Egyptian medical sources in the Sinai peninsula that the soldier was killed with two bullets from the back and not from the Palestinian side.