BICOM

Hamas yesterday aired a video calling for the resumption of bus bombings by suicide bombers against Israelis.

The six-minute clip on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Television, portrays a Hamas activist preparing to carry out a suicide attack, boarding an Israeli bus. Set to a song, the lyrics proclaim “To die as a martyr for Al-Aqsa [Mosque] gives the explosive device more and more force.” The video, which also portrays Yahya Ayyash, Hamas’s deceased former chief bomb-maker, continues saying, “The intifada is not an intifada if the bus roof doesn’t fly off.”

The current wave of violence, which has seen near-daily attacks on Israelis, has consisted mainly of knife and vehicle attacks. However, Hamas has called for the violence to be intensified. Hamas frequently carried out suicide attacks during the 1990s and the Second Intifada from 2000 onwards. During the current violence, Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces have arrested Hamas activists in the West Bank, a senior PA security official recently claiming that such actions helped thwart attacks on Israelis.

Nonetheless, leaders of Hamas and the Fatah faction of PA President Mahmoud Abbas met yesterday in Qatar’s capital Doha in the latest round of reconciliation talks. The two factions have been at loggerheads since Hamas violently overthrew Fatah from the Gaza Strip in 2007. Since then, there have been numerous talks and three agreements have been signed, but no change has yet been implemented.

According to the London-based A-Sharq Al-Awsat, yesterday’s discussions were attended by Hamas’s political chief Khaled Mashaal and senior leader Moussa Abu Marzouk, while Fatah sent Central Committee members Azzam al-Ahmad and Sakhr Basiso. They apparently discussed holding much-delayed presidential and legislative elections and paying the salaries of tens of thousands of civil servants working under the auspices of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

In an unrelated development, Hamas announced via social media yesterday that it had executed one of its own military commanders for “moral and behavioural violations,” thought by many to mean suspected collaboration with Israel.