Dahlan describes Hamas rule as a "crisis in Gaza"

Former Fatah official Mohammed Dahlan has described the situation with Hamas in Gaza as a “crisis” and has pledged to work to “solve the problem”. An elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Dahlan said that he is no longer surprised at the positions taken by a movement that has turned into a press machine which never tires of making accusations. The leaders of Hamas, he claims, have surrendered to the rumour mill and imaginative defamatory broadcasts.

Speaking to local media, Dahlan said that the Palestinian public have had patience with Hamas in the past because it used to concentrate on interaction within Palestine. “However, at a critical stage, the movement insists on implicating the Palestinian people and their cause in regional and international issues,” he alleged. “It has not learnt from its experience with the Syrians and Iranians and is now importing every crisis in a complex psychological sense of being humble and arrogant as well as clever and stupid at the same time.”

According to Dahlan, he is working with “others” to get the Palestinians over the crises they face, “specifically in the Gaza Strip” where the local citizens always have “fear, terror, disease and poverty as their companions”. This, he claimed, is caused by Hamas “which did not want and, apparently, does not seem to be willing to wake up from its own myth”. The Islamic Resistance Movement, he claims, “is not working towards a lifeline but rather is continuing to drown with the people drowning with it.” The doors are still open, he added, but Hamas has to be committed to what he called “logic, realism and partnership” with Fatah, which he calls euphemistically “the other Palestinians”.

He shrugged off attempts by the Hamas parliamentary bloc’s efforts to hold him to account for what it regards as his crimes against the elected government of Palestine (Dahlan led an Israeli-US funded coup attempt against Hamas in 2007). “Such people have lost their minds,” he mocked, “and do not want to admit to their own mistakes; they want to blame others.”

In closing, Dahlan insisted that the Palestinians can and should take strength from others but only for the benefit of the cause in the conflict with Israel. “Those who take strength from others against their own people are those who encourage their supporters to suppress their people for reasons related to non-Palestinian events.”