Following the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the murderous terrorist group has already picked his replacement, Khaled Mashaal, Haniyeh’s predecessor at the helm, at least temporarily, several news outlets are reporting on Wednesday.
According to Al Arabiya, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas called the head of the Hamas movement abroad, Khaled Meshaal, to offer his condolences for the assassination. Abbas expressed his deepest condolences during the phone call.
Mashaal currently serves as the leader of Hamas abroad. The position will be transferred to a temporary replacement until the organization’s leadership elections, which are planned for 2025, are held.
Mashaal is considered one of the biggest opponents of the Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. He also opposes the close connection of Hamas with the Iranian axis. He made no secret of his support for the Syrian rebels against the Iranian-backed Assad regime.
Pending a decision on Mashaal’s appointment, the one who will most likely take the reins, at least technically, is 73-year-old Musa Abu Marzouk. Marzouk already served as head of Hamas’s political office before Meshaal’s election, and is known for his many connections and his ability to raise funds for the terrorist organization.
On Saturday, Al Arabiya published a report it titled, “Khaled Meshaal sets seven points to put the Palestinian house in order.” Mashaal spoke at a Zoom symposium dedicated to the October 7 attack, organized by the Al-Zaytouna Center for Studies and Consultations, and said that after being in a state of hibernation, suddenly, on October 7, the “Palestinian issue” underwent unprecedented transformations, and the attack made Gaza the center of global interest.
Mashaal explained that the attack shocked people positively and made them realize that “Israel can be defeated. These are transformations in the soul, conscience, and political vision, and constitute a very important turning point and transformation.”
“The scenario closest to being realized is the collapse of this entity, its disintegration and loss of the justifications for its existence, and perhaps the international hand being lifted from it and its loss of its strategic value as a colonial tool to subjugate the region and achieve Western interests. … this entity can be defeated, and perhaps its collapse could become a reality at once.”
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Meshaal spoke about seven points that must be focused on to put the Palestinian house in order, saying: “The first point I call what actually happens after Oslo, and I mean that Oslo has theoretically existent manifestations, but in reality, it has disappeared since the second intifada, and Yasser Arafat, may God have mercy on him, turned against it when he saw that it had reached a dead end and that the enemy had turned against it.”
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Mashaal’s second point is the strategy of “resistance,” which is an Arab euphemism for killing Jewish civilians, men, women, and children, whenever they appear vulnerable, as he stated, “We have no path but resistance, and any other bet has proven to be a failure, as resistance is what creates opportunities and horizons.”
This talk of Hamas’s horizons reminds me of the late Shimon Peres, may God have mercy on him, who promised that once all the Jews and the IDF are out of the Gaza Strip, it would become the Singapore of the Middle East…
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Regarding the third point, Meshaal said that it revolves around the national project and the “joint Palestinian political program,” stressing that what is required today is agreement on the content of the national project, its concepts, and central titles, and the strategy followed to achieve it, whether military or political.
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The fourth point, according to Meshaal, revolves around the issue of the Palestinian state. As he put it: “Is the state first or liberation first? Do we want a state in the symbolic political sense as we declared it in 1988, or do we want a real state on the ground? I think we’ve had enough focusing on the state as a mere political symbol and title written on the letterheads of official papers, and this is a state in the air.”
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Meshaal’s fifth point is related to the “Palestinian” leadership, the national reference, and building “Palestinian” institutions: “To facilitate the matter, what are our mechanisms for arranging these institutions, the Palestinian leadership and the PLO, and building all our Palestinian political institutions? Our mechanisms are elections, consensus, and partnership, and we must all adhere to that, and activate and apply reason and political effort to these mechanisms, to pass the transitional phase with ease.”
Easy for him to say, with all the surveys showing Hamas winning open elections in the PA – things in Gaza are too murky to survey.
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His sixth point relates to a national consensus government and managing the situation in Gaza after the war, and the challenge of shelter, reconstruction, and relief for the people: “The priority is for a national consensus government that can be easily devoted to reconstruction, reconstruction and shelter for the people, and that we present figures representing the influential social groups in the Palestinian arena in Gaza and the West Bank, and the factions will support it.”
At this point, with this notion, Mashaal is probably more likely than Netanyahu to get a productive one-on-one with Kamala Harris and Antony Blinken…
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Finally, his seventh point is related to the challenge of the status of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, stressing that “this is a major challenge and should occupy us all, and this is an entitlement that has more to come, even if we are busy with the battle of Gaza, but this is the Palestinian homeland, the wound in Gaza concerns us and the wound in Jerusalem, the West Bank, the forty-eight and the camps, so any Palestinian leadership must live for its own satisfaction and concern, and advance the ranks and sacrifice.”
He concluded that October 7 “changed many facts and elements of the regional and international scene and within the entity and within the region, so it is absolutely not right for its impact to be absent from the arrangement of the Palestinian house, this is something we do not beg for, but it will be imposed by the fait accompli.”
Like I said, kill him now.
