By Xinhua
Gaza : An aide to deposed Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haneya on Thursday warned of “unexpected explosions” of the Palestinian people if the international community did not move to lift siege on the Gaza Strip.
“Don’t bet on Gaza’s patience,” Ahmed Yousef, Haneya’spolitical advisor, warned in a statement sent to the press.” Gaza is a barrel of burning gunpowder and it can’t be subject to the logic of evaluations and assessment by the others,” he added.
He accused Israel of putting the Palestinians to the brink of the “explosion,” saying “We have talked many times about calmness but Israel wants to keep its hands free to kill, assassinate and invade the occupied territories.”
He said it’s Israel’s current suffocating policies to the Palestinians forced Hamas to move to rescue the Palestinian people. Israel tightened its siege on the Gaza Strip, home to 1.5 million population, when Hamas routed the Palestinian security forces loyal to moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and thus took control of the poor coastal enclave in mid June.
Abbas, in response, sacked the Hamas-led unity government and installed a caretaker one in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Israel also stepped up military attacks on Palestinian fighters in the Hamas-ruled Gaza, saying the attacks were in response to the rocket fire that targets southern Israeli communities from Gaza.
On Jan. 23, Hamas militants blew holes on the border fence separating Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsular and allowed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to throng into Egyptian side to purchase daily necessities, which were in severe lack in Gaza amid strict Israeli blockade.
As for the border tumult last month, Yousef explained that the troubles at the Gaza-Egypt borders were not meant to make an economic separation between the Abbas-ruled West Bank and Hamas-controlled Gaza.
“Opening the borders was a message to the (Israeli) occupation and the world that the policies of pressure and starvation will not weaken the Palestinian people,” Yousef said.