Hamas calls on Ban Ki-moon to resign

The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement called on Thursday for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to resign after he blamed Hamas for breaking the first temporary truce during Israel’s 51-day offensive against the Gaza Strip last summer, Safa news agency has reported.

Hamas accused Ban of giving cover to the Israeli occupation authorities to commit more crimes against the Palestinians when he justified Israel’s sudden strike against the people of Gaza during the first hour of the temporary truce. A spokesman for the movement called on the secretary-general to apologise and then resign. “He must be objective,” said Sami Abu-Zuhri, “and not stand with one side against the other, especially when he does not have enough knowledge.”

In a documentary on Al-Jazeera Arabic Channel on Thursday, the Israelis claimed that Hamas broke the truce and that their troops were responding to Palestinian attacks and the kidnapping of one of their soldiers. This, claims the Islamic movement, is not true.

One and a half hours after the start of the truce, Hamas insists, the Israelis launched massive attacks against Palestinians without warning; at least 170 Palestinians were killed in the attack and hundreds more were wounded. Israel then accused Hamas of breaking the truce, claiming that Palestinian fighters had kidnapped an IDF soldier. Ban and other world leaders accepted, apparently without question, the Israeli narrative and blamed Hamas for breaking the truce before calling on it to return the captured soldier.

Al-Jazeera’s film proved that the Israeli narrative was false as it showed that Hamas fighters actually kidnapped the Israeli soldier two hours before the truce into force. The Israelis saw the corpse of a Palestinian fighter wearing an IDF uniform and, believing this to be one of their men, launched the assault against civilians a couple of hours later.