The exiled political chief of the Palestinian Hamas movement on Sunday slammed Arab and Islamic states for keeping silent over Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip. "What is happening in the Gaza Strip is a tragedy. Shame on those who stay silent on the criminal blockade that has been imposed on Gaza. Shame on Arab and Islamic regimes and on the international community," Khaled Meshaal told a meeting in Syria on the right of return for Palestinian refugees - a right enshrined in international law. "Every Arab country could send a boat to Gaza" to break the blockade imposed since Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006, Meshaal said.Boats from Cyprus carrying international peace activists have been able to do so three times in the past three months. Israel tightened the siege after Hamas pre-empted what many have described as a US-backed offensive by the rival Fatah movement of President Mahmoud Abbas aimed at ousting the Islamists from Gaza.
Various UN and EU officials, as well as scores of human rights groups, have slammed the siege as "collective punishment of a civilian population," an act that is defined by the Fourth Geneva Convention as a war crime.
On November 4 Israel shattered a five-month-old truce with Hamas by invading the Gaza Strip and killing seven members of the Islamist group. Under the terms of the agreement, which virtually halted violence in and around Gaza, Israel was to significantly ease the blockade. But the Jewish state did not honor its commitment.
In a speech Meshaal said the return of Palestinian refugees to a homeland now under Israeli occupation was "a natural right guaranteed under international law." "Anyone who compromises on the right of return is party to a great crime," he said.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), created in 1949 after the first Arab-Israeli war for Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, accords "refugee of Palestine" status to people who lived in Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, as well as to their descendants.