Top Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal rejects disarmament or ‘foreign rule’ |
A senior Hamas leader said Sunday that the Palestinian Islamist terror group would neither surrender its weapons nor accept foreign intervention in Gaza, pushing back against US and Israeli demands.
“Criminalizing the resistance, its weapons, and those who carried it out is something we should not accept,” Khaled Mashaal said at a conference in Doha.
“As long as there is occupation, there is resistance. Resistance is a right of peoples under occupation… something nations take pride in,” said Mashaal, who previously headed the terror group.
Offering an alternative to disarmament, Mashaal said Hamas would instead back an extended truce with Israel, during which it would commit to not using its weapons.
“Hamas proposed a truce of five to seven to 10 years. This is a guarantee that these weapons are not used,” Mashaal said, adding that the mediators would serve as guarantors of such a deal and that those countries — Egypt, Qatar and Turkey — are working to sell the idea to the Trump administration.
It was unclear whether he was referring to the idea of decommissioning weapons, which envisions them being gathered and stored in a warehouse guarded by Arab mediating countries.
Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas abroad, has spoken at the Al Jazeera Forum on the rights of Palestinians to resist occupation. The political leader says the demand of disarmament is unacceptable. pic.twitter.com/TqbH9uc2P7
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) February 8, 2026
Hamas, which vows to destroy Israel, launched a deadly cross-border onslaught into Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, amid acts of horrific brutality, and taking 251........