The Guardian reports: A woman who spent part of her school years in the UK is to become a public face of the Hamas government in Gaza following her appointment as its first female spokesperson.

Isra al-Modallal, 23, began her new job this week, and is brushing up on human rights law and other issues she will be expected to speak about. She plans to launch Twitter and Facebook campaigns in the near future to promote Hamas and its policies.

Modallal’s English has a detectable Yorkshire accent from the three years she attended school in Bradford while her father was at university. “I have good memories. It was a good part of my life,” she told the Guardian.

Since completing her degree in media studies at the Islamic university in Gaza, which is closely associated with Hamas, Modallal has worked as a journalist and television presenter. She accepted the offer of a job as the government’s international media spokesperson after “thinking about it for a while”.

She is not a member of Hamas. “I don’t belong to any [political] faction. I’m just Palestinian,” she said.

Modallal said she would concentrate on human rights and humanitarian issues. “Most people in the world recognise that Palestinians are humans too so the world will understand our message as refugees and people who live under siege,” she said.

The Associated Press reports: Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal has set an ambitious agenda for his new term, seeking to transform his Islamic militant movement that rules Gaza into a widely recognized political force, but without making concessions toward Israel needed for international acceptance.

Re-elected last week, Mashaal will try to deepen ties with regional powers Qatar, Turkey and Egypt, which have already given money or political support to Gaza and could be conduits to the U.S. and Europe, several leading Hamas figures said.

Mashaal will also push for a power-sharing deal with his Western-backed Palestinian rival, President Mahmoud Abbas.

Mashaal “wants Hamas to be a recognized and legitimate player,” said Jordan-based analyst Mouin Rabbani, who frequently meets with Palestinian politicians, including Hamas members.

Al-Monitor: Dr. Ghazi Hamad, deputy foreign minister in the Hamas government, is thought to be one of the people spearheading the movement’s pragmatic wing. Two years ago, the secret channel of communication he maintained with Dr. Gershon Baskin led to a breakthrough in the protracted negotiations over the release of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, in exchange for the release of over 1,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. There can be no doubt that the results of these negotiations earned Hamad a position of honor within the Hamas movement and, more broadly, among the Palestinian public.

Hamad is considered to be very close to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, whom he once served as spokesman, and to the chief of Hamas’ political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, the movement’s newly reelected leader.

In an exclusive interview with Al-Monitor, Hamad analyzes the next steps that his movement will take, now that Khaled Meshaal has been reelected to head its reconstituted political bureau, and following the change within the movement’s bureau .

Al Monitor: Does Meshaal’s election signify a change in Hamas’ attitudes?

Hamad: First of all, we must remember that these were democratic elections, and as such, they are a credit to the movement. Elections for Hamas’ other institutions ended a year ago, and that was the last time that the Hamas movement expressed confidence in its leaders and their proposal to institute changes to Hamas’ policy. This included reconciliation with Fatah, among other things.

Al Monitor: When you talk about new policy, do you mean an end to the armed struggle and a transition to what Meshaal calls a “popular uprising”?

Hamad: As leader of the movement, Khaled Meshaal agreed to shift to a popular uprising. All of that began during the reconciliation talks. It emerged from a comprehensive vision of the movement’s future and the type of leadership that the Palestinian people need. And yet, though Meshaal is prepared to make a tactical shift to a popular uprising, armed struggle remains a legitimate right as long as the Occupation continues. At the same time, there is an extensive political and diplomatic program which we must advocate and work toward, and that includes joining the official institutions of the PLO. Those are our objectives, and that is our new approach.

Al Monitor: Does that include agreement to go back to the 1967 borders?

Hamad: Hamas has stated that it is prepared to accept a state within the 1967 borders.

Al Monitor: A two-state solution?

Hamad: We do not say “two states.” We agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, within the 1967 borders, and that this would include a solution to the refugee problem. What I can tell you is that all factions in the movement agree to this and are prepared to accept it. [Continue reading…]

AFP reports: The newly re-elected chief of Hamas, Khalid Mashaal, pledged on Thursday to work to end a rift with his West Bank rival, President Mahmoud Abbas.

Mashaal, speaking at a pro-Palestinian conference in Cairo, “affirmed his movement’s solicitude for ending the division with its negative effects,” the Safa news agency quoted his as saying.

But he hinted that Hamas would not renounce its opposition to Israel’s existence nor its use of violence, conditions for Israel and the United States to accept it as a partner in a Palestinian government.

“The (Israeli) occupation exploits the division and placed hurdles before a reconciliation (with Fatah),” he said. Hamas would work for unity “but that does not mean abandoning fixed positions.”

Mashaal’s reelection was confirmed on Tuesday, drawing a cautious welcome from his Fatah rivals.

Meanwhile, AFP also reported: Hamas on Friday urged the United Nations to reconsider its suspension of food aid for Palestinian refugees, imposed after protesters stormed a UN depot.

The UN Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, stopped food deliveries after dozens of Gazans forced their way into the field office on Thursday, demanding reinstatement of a monthly cash allowance to poor families which was halted from April 1 due to budget cuts.

“This is an unjustified step from UNRWA,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said.

“There is a right of peaceful protest for Palestinian refugees,” he said, adding: “We call on UNRWA to reevaluate its position and not to overreact to residents’ protest.”

AFP reports: Hamas re-elected its veteran exiled leader Khaled Meshaal in Cairo on Monday, said an official of the Palestinian Islamist movement that rules Gaza.

“The leaders of Hamas chose Meshaal,” the high-ranking official told AFP via telephone from the Egyptian capital, requesting anonymity.

Hamas officials said earlier that the movement’s governing shura council was poised to renew Meshaal’s leadership for another four years, with one describing his re-election as “widely known”.

Prior to Monday’s vote, however, there had been speculation that the exiled leader would be forced aside by the movement’s powerful leaders in the Gaza Strip, which it has controlled since 2007.

Meshaal himself had said last year that he would not seek a new term.

But developments in the Middle East since the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 “pushed Hamas to choose Meshaal… who has given the movement a national face… and has good relations in the Arab world,” one Hamas official said Monday.

Al Monitor: Following US mediation, personally led by President Barack Obama during his visit to the region, Israel and Turkey have finally renormalized their diplomatic relations.

This new Israeli-Turkish agreement brought to mind the Israeli attack on the Freedom Flotilla, where nine Turkish activists on board were killed on May 31, 2010. This attack was what pushed Israel to ease its blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Hamas welcomed Israel’s apology, in the hope that Turkey would continue with its pressure to further ease the blockade.

The head of Hamas’ foreign relations department, Bassem Naim, said in an interview with Al-Monitor, that “this apology represents a major milestone in the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict in the region, since it is the first time Israel has offered an apology of this kind.

“Israel’s crimes against humanity can no longer be overlooked in light of the emergence of a powerful and respectable state such as Turkey, whose new diplomacy is based on solid ground,” he added.

Turkey had imposed three conditions on Israel as a prerequisite to exchanging ambassadors and normalizing relations between the countries. First, Israel must offer an apology, compensate the victims’ families and lift the blockade on the Gaza Strip.

It should be noted that Israel has maintained economic constraints on the Gaza Strip by shutting the commercial crossing of Karam Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom), after militants in Gaza recently fired rockets at Israeli towns. Israel has also restricted fishing areas in the Mediterranean, violating the stipulations of the Oslo Accords in this regard. Additionally, movement through the Erez crossing has been limited.

According to Naim, Israel will try to evade Turkey’s condition of lifting the blockade on Gaza by misleading the public and Turkey, claiming that it has [already] been allowing goods to enter the area freely.

Efraim Halevy writes: he recent news out of the Middle East has been grim. But, if there’s an atmosphere of pessimism in the international press, that’s because the real story hasn’t been earning any attention—intentionally so. We can all read about Hamas’s daily maligning of Israel, and its promises to put an end to Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land, just as we can read about Israeli officials continuing to demand that Hamas recognize the right of Israel (including Jerusalem) to exist, knowing full well that no devout Muslim has ever done so, or can ever do so. The past month has also seen hunger strikes by prominent Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, which have incited widespread demonstrations in Palestinian territories.

What hasn’t earned much attention are the successive rounds of negotiations between Israeli army officers and other security officials and their Egyptian counterparts, mostly in Cairo, parallel to those that the Egyptians have been conducting with Hamas personnel. These “non-negotiations” between Israel and Hamas might be critical in finding a durable solution for their conflict.

But both sides prefer to keep the talks quiet. Hamas and Israel each appreciate the advantages of maintaining a diplomatic fiction while they pursue their real interests. Each side can thus publicly maintain its ideological purity, biding its time as it ascertains the intentions of the other. The ultimate effect may be to lay the groundwork for a pragmatic, and unprecedented, system of coexistence. This may not be the classic “peace process,” but it is may prove a fateful process, nonetheless. [Continue reading…]

Geoffrey Aronson writes: If it is possible to talk about a “good” war, then Israel’s Pillar of Defense against the Gaza Strip may well fit the bill. The war was a disaster — in human and material destruction. No one would argue otherwise. But it also crystallized a shared interest in stabilizing the conflict between Israel and Gaza — creating an opportunity that the three principal parties to the conflict — Israel, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and Egypt — recognize and appear determined to exploit.

Gaza has long been the most dynamic arena where Israel and Palestinian interests collide. Battles have been fought with depressing regularity, and the periods of calm are inherently unstable, given the failure to reach a grand diplomatic bargain. But it is also the case that Israel, largely through Egyptian good offices, has since Ariel Sharon’s announcement in March 2004 of his intention to “disengage” from Gaza, enjoyed a more fruitful and successful dialogue with Hamas than with the PLO’s Mahmoud Abbas and the West Bank under his nominal rule. Today, Israel’s Egyptian-mediated dialogue with Hamas represents the only working diplomatic channel between Israel and the Palestinians.

The two-paragraph cease-fire document agreed to by Israel and Hamas on Nov. 21 is the latest example of this workmanlike relationship. Hamas did not sign the document, in keeping with the fiction that Israel is not negotiating with Hamas. This is only a cosmetic convenience however, that reflects the shared, strategic interest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Hamas leadership of Khaled Meshal alike. So too the document itself, which offers something for all parties, except that of Palestine’s president Mahmoud Abbas of course, and his Palestinian Authority(PA), which has been reduced to a facilitator of understandings reached between Israel and the government in Gaza. [Continue reading…]

AFP reports: Thousands of Palestinians attended a rare Hamas rally in the northern West Bank city of Nablus on Thursday, celebrating the group’s “victory” over Israel in Gaza.

The rally is the first time that the West Bank’s ruling Palestinian Authority (PA) — which is dominated by the Fatah faction, Hamas’s bitter rival — has allowed such a gathering since 2007.

It comes as the two movements, which dominate the Palestinian political scene, take tentative steps towards restarting a fraught reconciliation process, which has stalled in the past year.

An AFP correspondent said at least 5,000 people took part in the celebration, which also marked 25 years since the establishment of the Islamist group which rules the Gaza Strip.

Despite an overcast sky, the mood was exuberant, with enthusiastic youths waving the green flag of Hamas as a procession left the city’s Al-Nasser mosque.

“Our message is that Hamas is here, on the ground and in the heart of our people,” Hamas MP Hosni al-Burini told AFP.

Ma’an News Agency reports: Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal said Sunday that it was time for his party and their Fatah rivals to put their mistakes behind them.

“Hamas can’t live without Fatah and other factions, neither can Fatah live without Hamas,” the exiled party chief, on his first visit to the Gaza Strip, said during a ceremony at the Islamic University in Gaza.

“We made mistakes against each other but God puts our wrongdoing behind us, so let’s forgive each other,” Meshaal said.

Palestine is greater than any one faction, he continued.

In an interview with Paul Martin, editor-in-chief of ConflictZones.tv, Moussa Abu Marzook, deputy politburo leader of Hamas and a strong contender to replace outgoing chairman Khaled Meshaal, says: “It is not useful for us to negotiate [with Israel] at this time. Negotiations, they have two conditions: the first condition, to be equal; the second condition” to be strong enough to prevent Israel doing anything unacceptable to the Palestinians.

Marzook also says that there will be no solution to the Palestinian problem until the Arab states resolve their own economic, political, and security problems. Only once having addressed these problems can Arabs be united and help each other. “We can talk about a new Palestine after we see all of those countries solve their problems.”

The Ma’an News Agency reports: The Hamas government in the Gaza Strip on Sunday indicated they would free prisoners affiliated to their West Bank rivals Fatah, giving further momentum to reconciliation efforts since the Israeli war on the coastal enclave.

Government spokesman Taher al-Nunu said the government would grant an amnesty to all suspects and prisoners related to its conflict with Fatah in 2006.

The government will set up a committee to implement this measure, he said.

Al-Nunu said the government decided to leave the period of the division behind them out of respect for national unity.

The parties fought bitterly after Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006, splitting into separate governments in Gaza and the West Bank a year later.

Reconciliation talks have repeatedly stumbled, but Israel’s eight-day war on the Gaza Strip which ended Wednesday gave political impetus to ending the division. [Continue reading…]

This is an interesting interview with the leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal. Christiane Amanpour, however, is flat wrong when she emphatic claims that “international agreements” have settled the question of the right of return. Just like the status of Jerusalem, this is an unresolved issue. No Palestinian has signed any agreement renouncing the right of return.

AMANPOUR: Under the international agreements every Palestinian who’s living in the diaspora is not going to be able to come back to Israel.

MESHAAL (through translator): Who said that? Who said that?

AMANPOUR: That’s what are the parameters.

Reuters reports: Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal looked like a man at home in Cairo this week as he used the Egyptian capital to declare terms for a ceasefire with Israel, his confidence reflecting the historic changes shaping an Arab world more supportive of his cause.

In Cairo for talks on the Gaza crisis, the bearded Hamas leader in exile has been warmly received in a country where officials viewed his movement with suspicion bordering on outright hostility when Hosni Mubarak was in power.

In stark contrast to those days, a smiling Meshaal was photographed on Monday meeting President Mohamed Mursi, the head of a new Egyptian administration shaped by the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’ spiritual mentor. Mursi, unlike Mubarak, is taking a personal interest in truce talks Egypt is overseeing.

Behind the scenes, Hamas leaders are finding a very different attitude from the Egyptian mediators. In Mubarak’s days, the Palestinians often complained that Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who died earlier this year, would try to impose Israel’s terms on them.

“The Egyptian brothers in the intelligence service have always helped in truce matters, this time they are being more helpful because President Mursi is in charge,” said a source close to Hamas. “The former regime used to pressure us more than they did Israel,” the source said.

The changes buoying Hamas have started to become clear in the tone from other Arab states too – a delegation of eight Arab ministers arrived in Gaza on Tuesday in the latest visit to express solidarity with the Palestinians.

The shift marks a challenge to the policies of Western governments including the United States. They shun Hamas as a terrorist group, dealing instead with the Palestinian Authority, from which Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007.

It also shows that public opinion is starting to have an impact on the foreign policies of Arab states long run by autocrats who have paid scant attention to the views of populations broadly supportive of the Palestinians.