Jabril Rajoub, Secretary of Fatah's Central Committee, praised Hamas's October 7 massacre in Israel's South during a press conference in Kuwait earlier this month, a local newspaper reported in Arabic.
Rajoub called the attack – during which thousands of Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel, shooting, raping, burning, and beheading about 1,200 people – "an earthquake, an unprecedented event," portraying it as a defensive action against Israeli "aggression" – which includes Israel's response to it.
Rajoub said that Hamas's attack, part of a "defensive war full of epics and heroics that the Palestinian people have been fighting for 75 years," thwarted a plan "by the Israeli Right" to integrate the country into the larger Middle East without the Palestinian issue on the agenda.
In fact, Israel's imminent rapprochement with Saudi Arabia at the time of Hamas's brutal attack is widely said to have included a demand for Israeli concessions on the Palestinian issue to preserve the possibility of a two-state solution.
Analysts have speculated that Hamas timed the attack to sabotage this agreement, which itself came after years of diplomacy between Israel and the Gulf states, culminating in the Abraham Accords. As Neville Teller wrote in The Jerusalem Post earlier this year, "Hamas believes that the only effective way to achieve the desired outcome is through continual conflict and terror," unlike other Palestinian factions that endorse, or at least entertain, the possibility of a peace agreement with Israel.
Rajoub invokes international law, support for a Palestinian state
Fatah, Rajoub's party, which governs the Palestinian Authority under the leadership of President Mahmoud Abbas, officially supports a two-state solution. The secretary said it was to preserve this possibility, as well as the states' national security, that Jordan and Egypt have refused to accept Palestinian refugees fleeing the war in Gaza.
Fatah and Hamas have consistently found themselves in conflict with each other over the years, including during a 2006-2007 armed conflict in Gaza, when Hamas, which had been elected democratically, seized control of the Strip by force.
Even so, "no one today can [deny] that we are one people living in one homeland and our project is one," Rajoub said. He named this project as "an independent state with full sovereignty in accordance with the resolutions of international legitimacy."
Regarding Israel's northern border with Lebanon, which has seen consistent exchanges of fire between the IDF and the Iranian proxy Hezbollah, Rajoub said that "from day one, the Israeli Right has been seeking to expand the war." and that it was the American administration that has prevented the war from expanding.