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Hamas says Israel threat on exiled leaders serious
Exiled Hamas leaders are taking seriously Israeli threats to kill them although they were not involved in a Palestinian operation that captured an Israeli soldier, a Hamas leader in Syria said on Tuesday."We consider the threat serious but it does not scare us," Mohammad Nazzal, a member of the movement's exiled leadership, told Reuters. "Israel is trying to export its crisis by linking Hamas leadership in exile, especially Khaled Meshaal, to the operation ... the outside leadership of Hamas had nothing to do with it," Nazzal said. Israeli has threatened to assassinate exiled officials of Hamas, including the group's most prominent leader Khaled Meshaal, unless a 19-year-old Israeli soldier is freed. The Israeli soldier was captured on Sunday in an attack that included Hamas's military wing on an Israeli military position near Gaza. Nazzal, Meshaal and several other Hamas politburo members have lived for years in Damascus. The Syrian government has resisted pressure by the United States, Israel's chief ally, to expel them and close the Muslim group's offices. Hamas's armed wing and the other factions involved in the raid said Israel would not receive information about the soldier unless it freed all jailed Palestinian women and youths. Israel, which has around 100 Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers positioned just across from northern Gaza, has rejected the offer. Asked whether it was worth keeping the Israeli soldier captive given the risk of an Israeli attack on Gaza, Nazzal said: "Estimating the situation lies with the groups holding him. Gaza has been subjected to numerous Israeli aggressions and the Palestinians feel that they won't pay more dearly than this." Hamas's armed wing says it carried out Sunday's attack, which killed two Israeli soldiers, with other factions but has not said it was holding the soldier. A senior Israeli military official said recently that Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, was predominantly under Meshaal's control, but diplomats in Damascus are less certain. "It appears that they are more or less their own bosses. Meshaal cannot exercise meaningful control simply because of the difficulty to communicate securely between Damascus and Gaza," one Western diplomat said. Israeli assassins failed to kill Meshaal, who has a degree in physics, when he was in Jordan in 1997. Israel has killed many Hamas leaders since. Posted by: tipper 2006-06-27 |
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