A senior Hamas leader says the U.S.-designated terrorist group plans
to push ahead with a violent intifada in Israel and called Tuesday’s
grisly attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem a “natural retort” to
“Israeli crimes” against Palestinians.
“The resistance movement will never remain silent against the Israeli
crimes and invitations to calm which are aimed at suppressing the
Intifada is useless,” said Mahmoud al-Zahar, according to Iran’s
government-controlled news service, Fars.
Mr. al-Zahar’s comments, which Fars said were made on Tuesday, flew in
the face of calls by the Obama administration for Palestinian leaders
to condemn the attacks and resist fanning flames of
Israeli-Palestinian tension.
Following Tuesday’s attack, friction between the two sides has reached
their highest point since a delicate August cease-fire tamped down a
summer of war that saw Israeli fighter jets pound the Hamas-controlled
Gaza strip in response to thousands of rockets fired into Israel.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry on Tuesday said “Palestinian
leadership must condemn” the Synagogue attack and “must begin to take
serious steps to restrain any kind of incitement that comes from their
language, from other people’s language, and exhibit the kind of
leadership that is necessary to put this region on a different path.”
The plea appears to have gone unheeded by Hamas, whose top officials
have heaped praise on Tuesay’s attack. But Israeli leaders have also
made aggressive statements during the incident’s aftermath.
Bristling with rage on Tuesday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu called on Israelis to “unify forces” and ordered security
operatives to fan out across Jerusalem and demolish the homes of the
two Palestinian cousins who were shot dead by police after storming
the morning prayers at the synagogue with butcher knives and a gun.
Describing the attackers as “human animals who committed this
massacre,” Mr. Netanyahu said that “there are those who wish to uproot
us from the capital, from our land.”
“They will not be successful,” he said.
Four men, including the three Americans, were hacked to death in the
synagogue attack and an Israeli police officer died later of a gunshot
wound. The attackers were also shot dead in the incident.
The Israeli government’s response is expected to be aggressive. Early
Wednesday, Israeli officials said that security forces had demolished
the family home of an east Jerusalem Palestinian who had used his
vehicle to ram a crowd of pedestrians at a tram stop last month,
according to the Los Angeles Times.
The paper reported that the overnight demolition revived a
controversial Israeli-government demolition practice that had largely
been abandoned in recent years.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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