Mick Hartley

A letter in the Times this morning:

Sir, The ordinary people living in Gaza are not just Palestinians, they’re Gazans. The Gaza Strip, as it was called, was part of Egypt from 1948 until the 1979 peace agreement with Israel, forged after the 1973 war. Egypt refused to take it back because members of the Muslim Brotherhood were living there who were committed to the destruction of Israel. As a result Israel was left to govern the territory until 2005, when it withdrew totally and handed responsibility for governance to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in return for peace. During its period of governance Israel developed the economy of Gaza to the benefit of those living there. It left Gaza with an $80 million agricultural industry, a state-of-the-art greenhouse business that employed 10,000 people, conduits to overseas markets, a functioning airport, a rail system ready to be linked to the Israeli one, modern housing and a functioning healthcare system, all of which were destroyed with the encouragement of the PA within a few weeks. The citizens of Gaza voted overwhelmingly in 2006, in the only election held in Gaza, for Hamas, whose manifesto included a promise to wipe Israel off the face of the map. Between them Hamas and the PA have destroyed multiple opportunities for Gaza, and the $70 billion worth of aid injected into Palestinian/Gazan development has managed not to replace what Israel established. The Arab tragedy of Gaza has been created by the PA and Hamas.
Lewis Herlitz

To go with Mourning lost Gaza last week.

And the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh?

The leader of Hamas, whose fortune is estimated at about $4 billion while many in Gaza struggle on $1 a day, rarely gives interviews. So when I met him in Istanbul for The Times a year ago, he did not pull any punches. “We are ready for war,” he said. “We are always ready for war.”

However the war Hamas has started over the past week now threatens to bring even more misery to the 2.3 million people living under his brutal rule in Gaza. Yet Haniyeh, 61, appears determined to stay the course.

The Iranians are bankrolling Hamas and are working ever more closely with them and their Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, along with other Iran-backed Palestinian factions such as Islamic Jihad and Lions’ Den. Over the weekend Haniyeh met Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the Iranian foreign minister, in Doha….

Haniyeh has celebrated the terrorist attacks on Israel, claiming they showed the “battle moved into the heart of the Zionist entity”. The man who now holds court with the Middle East’s most feared leaders was groomed from a young age by the Hamas movement’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was finally assassinated by Israel in 2004. Haniyeh learnt his hate from the best.

He has, however, tried to craft an image of himself beyond the keffiyeh-clad terrorist in a sharp-pressed suit. Inside his spacious office staff run around him like a king. He is softly spoken, and if he does speak any English, does not show it.

When I met him he was sitting behind his grand desk, somewhat portly and stiff. There was none of the Middle Eastern animation and gesticulation one might expect. He was almost robotic as he repeated a well-trodden script of hatred.

I asked him how he justified training the hundreds of children in Hamas military summer camps every year, where young boys are taught everything from firing weapons to urban warfare. He smiled and told me the guns were “toys”, “wooden guns” and the camps were nothing more than “games”….

Haniyeh was re-elected as leader of the Palestinian Islamist group in 2021 after becoming Hamas chief in 2017. He controls the terror group’s political activities in Gaza, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the diaspora from exile in Turkey and Qatar.

His income is as opaque as his group’s funding. He is alleged to have embezzled charitable funds and levied taxes on tunnel use for passage in and out of Gaza. He even has businesses operating outside Gaza, including one in the United Arab Emirates.

Though Gaza may provide his income, he shows little signs of caring for its people. When Israel warned those living in the north last week that they must move south to avoid military action, Haniyeh hit out. “No to displacement from Gaza,” he said, “and no to displacement from Gaza to Egypt”. When he said that, he was staying at the Four Seasons hotel in Doha, paid for by Qatar, according to reports.

The cynicism is breath-taking. The people of Gaza are just expendable pawns to these people, to be sacrificed for the greater aim of destroying Israel.