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Hamas Wants to Create Palestinian Army

The so-called "political leader" of the internationally-known terrorist group Hamas has said it could create a new Palestinian army following its surprise election victory. Previous negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians had seemed geared toward the only kind of Arab state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea that the Jewish state would accept after nearly six decades of war: a demilitarized one.

And so Israeli officials condemned the plan, demanding along most of the international community that Hamas renounce violence and recognize the right of Israel to exist. Palestinian security officers, including loyalists from the defeated Fatah Party, said they would never submit to Hamas control, increasing the chances of internecine violence between Palestinians of the kind that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has tried to avoid.

The Hamas chief, Khaled Mashaal, meanwhile has reiterated that Hamas would not recognize Israel and indicated attacks on Israeli civilians would continue as long as Israel continued to target Palestinian civilians. "As long as we are under occupation then resistance is our right," he said. For the record, Israeli officials constantly point out that they do not intentionally target or attack Palestinian civilians while Hamas with its suicide bombings and rocket attacks has done so on a regular basis but have done little to respond to Hamas accusations like that, preferring to let the international community come to its own conclusions, apparently.