Hamas officials talk to Israeli media

Taking their message to a state they don’t recognise, the Hamas prime minister gave an interview to an Israeli newspaper and his top aide spoke in Hebrew on the radio Tuesday. Danny Rubinstein of the newspaper Haaretz said Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh received him without an appointment, a rare gesture. Rubinstein told Israel Radio that he believes Hamas is reaching out to Israelis. Cabinet Secretary Ghazi Hamad was interviewed on Israel Radio, speaking in fluent Hebrew he learned in Israeli prisons. He made clear that recognizing Israel is not on the Hamas agenda, but that a long-term truce is possible if Israel withdraws from the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, the territories it captured in the 1967 Mideast War. Haniyeh and Hamad said Hamas would consider a truce with Israel, though both fell far short of recognising the Jewish state, accepting previous peace accords and renouncing violence. (AP ABC News,May 24, 2006)

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>