Al-aqsa Tv’s Vice-director On The Prospects For Peace With The Jews

What are the chances of Israel achieving a durable peace with a Hamas-led Gaza? Late last month, some tens days after Israel called a halt to its offensive in Gaza, Lorenzo Cremonesi of the leading Italian daily Corriere della Sera spoke with Mohammad Thuraya, the vice-director of Hamas’s Al-Aqsa television. Thuraya’s words provide some idea of the prospects. “Every war of liberation involves a price,” Thuraya said philosophically, alluding to a strike on Al-Aqsa’s headquarters. And then he continued:

Unfortunately, there will be many more victims still. The war has just begun. After every truce, we will start fighting again, because the Jews are by nature treacherous, they can’t keep their commitments. Even the Quran says so. But we are not afraid. Allah helps us. In the end, the Jews will leave our lands and, perhaps not my 5-year-old son Ali, but at least my grandchildren will see freedom.

In his article, titled “Hamas: Censorship and Threats in the Gaza Strip,” Cremonesi also reports on the efforts of Hamas to control the information getting out of the Gaza Strip and to suppress discussion of the bloody internecine conflict between Hamas and Fatah or of the use of civilians as human shields. “We are more and more under a totalitarian regime that is trying to impose the sharia,” one Saek Abu Suliman, a professor of Arab literature, is reported as saying: “It is the reign of silence that prevails.” The angriest local reporters, Cremonesi notes, say it is “like under the regime of Saddam.”