Hamas: Mashaal did not accept the two-state solution

"We will never agree to giving the Zionist state one inch of the land of Palestine," senior Hamas official says.

By KHALED ABU TOAMEH
Mashaal and Abdullah 521 (photo credit: YOUSEF ALLAN / REUTERS)
Mashaal and Abdullah 521
(photo credit: YOUSEF ALLAN / REUTERS)
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.


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