Former Jewish Cities Now Hamas Training Centers
Two Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip evacuated by Israel have recently been turned into advanced Hamas militant training centers, according to a senior member of Hamas’s so-called military wing.
Monday night, Israelis living near Gaza and Palestinians inside the territory heard loud explosions coming from the northern Gaza Strip area. It turned out the blasts were part of a Hamas explosives training exercise conducted in the former Jewish communities of Eli Sinai and Dagit in Gaza, said Abu Abdullah, considered one of the most important operational members of Hamas’ Izzedine al-Kassam Martyrs Brigades, Hamas’s declared “resistance” department.
Abu Abdullah told WorldNetDaily that Hamas has turned Eli Sinai and Dagit into advanced training zones, which he said include areas for “physical shape exercises; use of weapons training; practice lands for ambushes of Israeli forces; courses for the reading of maps and [production and use of] explosives and many other trainings; military techniques, fighting in open fields and in built and populated areas; and rockets shooting.”
He called the utilization by Hamas of the former Jewish towns for anti-Israel activity a “big sign from Allah that the settlements that were the strongest symbol and proof of the Zionist injustice are now turned into tools at the service of the Palestinian resistance against the enemy plans and are proof that the resistance works.”
The Hamas terror leader said his group stepped up the pace of its training the past few weeks because of a “coming” confrontation with Israel.
Meanwhile, Yoav Galant, chief of the IDF’s Gaza-area division, told reporters that a truce Israel forged in November with militants in Gaza enabled Hamas to grow from a ragtag terror group into a well-organized militia resembling an army – complete with battalions, companies, platoons, special forces for surveillance, snipers and explosive experts.
U.S. To Dialogue With Syria?
The European Union is pressing the U.S. to alter its policy toward Syria and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be more in line with recommendations made last December by the Iraq Study Group, according to senior Palestinian and British diplomatic officials.
The Study Group urged the U.S. to engage in dialogue with Syria and said the Jewish state should be pressured into withdrawing from the West Bank and Golan Heights.
A diplomat from Britain’s Foreign Ministry touring Israel this week confirmed the EU is in talks with the U.S. about changing its Mideast policy. He said the UK received signals that Washington is ready to act on some of the Study Group recommendations.
“About these so-called two Temples, they never existed, certainly not at the Haram Al-Sharif [Temple Mount],” Tamimi said in an exclusive interview with this column.
He said descriptions of the Jewish Temples in the Tanach, in the Talmud and in Byzantine and Roman writings from the Temple periods were forged, and that the Torah was falsified to claim biblical patriarchs and matriarchs were Jewish when indeed they were prophets for Islam.
Tamimi went on to claim that the Al Aksa Mosque, which has sprung multiple leaks and has had to be repainted several times, was built by angels. “Al Aksa was built by the angels forty years after the building of Al-Haram in Mecca. This we have no doubt is true,” he said.
Terrorists: Bush Forces ‘False Confession’ From Al Qaeda Chief
While the confession of the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks was widely received in the United States as a monumental development in the war against terror, it wasn’t taken as well by Palestinian militant leaders who told WND they believe the real culprits of the attacks – Jews and Zionist agents – are still at large.
“The Americans are facing a dangerous security situation in Iraq,” said Abu Jihad, a West Bank leader of the Islamic Jihad terror organization. “Bush is under a lot of pressure for victories, so I am sure as part of changing the American public opinion [Bush] needed to orchestrate this confession so he can say he is succeeding even though he is a failure.”
Abu Nasser, deputy commander of the Brigades in the northern West Bank town of Nablus, charged, “The Jews sent the planes to the World Trade Center to start a war against Muslims. Also Bush wanted an excuse to invade our lands.”