We all (I hope) saw the televised interview in which Khaled Meshal said,
"We do not target civilians, and we try most of the time to aim at military targets and Israeli bases," Meshaal said. "But we admit that we have a problem. We do not have sophisticated weapons. We do not have the weapons available to our enemy … so aiming is difficult. We do promise you, though, that we will try in the future and we will warn people … We have given warnings to Israeli civilians. We promise that if we get more precise weapons, we will only target military targets."
If you wanted to know why Israel continues a blockade and demands in negotiations that supervision be applied to all imports into the Gaza Strip, the answer is above.
If there is a negotiated arrangement leading to peace, why would Hamas require more sophisticated, more precise weapons?
And there was this, too:
Meshaal acknowledged for the first time that Hamas members — but not the group''s political leadership — were behind the slaying of three Israeli settlers on the West Bank in June. But he defended the murders as a legitimate action against Israeli "illegal" occupation."We were not aware of this action taken by this group of Hamas members in advance," he said. "But we understand people are frustrated under the occupation and the oppression, and they take all kinds of action."When asked directly whether Hamas members carried out the abduction of the Israeli teens, Meshaal said: "We learned about these confessions from the Israeli investigation … Hamas political leadership was not aware of all these details. We learned about it later on …"Our view is that soldiers and settlers on the West Bank are aggressors, and they are illegally living in this occupied and stolen land. And the right to resist is the right of Palestinians."
Do not forget that all of Israel is an "illegal settlement" and all Israelis are "settlers" according to Hamas. ("Israel subdues Palestinians of 1948 occupied lands").
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