Hamas denied Thursday that its leader, Khaled Mashaal, had declared his
acceptance of the two-state solution.
The denial came following a report
in a Saudi-owned newspaper that claimed Mashaal had authorized Jordan’s King
Abdullah to notify the US administration that Hamas had accepted the twostate
solution.
Mashaal met with Abdullah in Amman earlier this week and
discussed with him Jordan’s efforts to revive the peace process and ways of
ending the Hamas-Fatah dispute.
“These claims are baseless,” said Izzat
al-Risheq, a senior Hamas official. “The two-state solution issue was not
discussed during the meeting between brother Mashaal and King
Abdullah.”
Yehya Musa, another senior Hamas official, claimed that
international parties have been trying to create confusion among Hamas’s ranks
by saying that the Islamist movement has accepted the two-state
solution.
Hamas, he stressed, does not accept the two-state solution
“under any circumstances.”
Musa said that this solution was totally
unacceptable “and we will never agree to giving the Zionist state one inch of
the land of Palestine.”
He reiterated Hamas’s commitment to the
“liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”
Accepting a
Palestinian state within the pre-1967 lines does not mean that Hamas would ever
recognize Israel’s right to the rest of the land, he explained.
Hamas
legislator Salah Bardaweel also denied that his movement was prepared to accept
the two-state solution.
“Hamas’s political program can’t change
overnight,” he said. He too said that there was a difference between accepting a
Palestinian state on the 1967 territories and recognizing Israel’s right to
exist –something which, he added, Hamas would never do.