Assessment: New Hamas Charter, May 2017: ‘Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.
Fifteen years ago, in June 2007, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict underwent a seismic shift. The Islamist terror faction Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip through a series of deadly raids, firing rockets and mortars at Fatah-run Palestinian Authority bases and storming their positions. In brutal executions, Hamas hurled P.A. personnel to their deaths from rooftops and conducted shootouts in hospitals, forcing many of the remaining P.A. personnel to flee to the West Bank.
Looking back at the Palestinian arena over the past generation, Col. (res.) David Hacham, a former Arab-affairs adviser to seven Israeli defense ministers and a senior research associate at the MirYam Institute, told JNS that “there is no doubt that the main, most significant and dramatic development has been Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip and its forceful expulsion, through the use of violence, of the Palestinian Authority and its personnel from the area.”
” … And no survivor shall remain of the house of Esau,”
For the Lord has spoken.” Obadiah 1:18
This event had a long-term impact on all subsequent internal Palestinian developments, particularly on the balance of power between Hamas and Fatah, and on the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he said.
“The takeover of Gaza by Hamas was one of the peaks in the process of Hamas’s build-up of force [since its founding in 1987] and in its efforts to promote its strategic aspiration to turn into the leading, dominant force in the Palestinian system,” said Hacham.
These efforts, which are ongoing today, are accompanied by constant attempts to erode the position of the rival Fatah movement as part of Hamas’s goal of taking over the P.A. and the PLO, according to Hacham.
