The Palestinians are absolute masters at double talk. They kidnap a soldier, they launch rockets at civilians, but the incursion by the IDF to try to rescue the kidnapped soldier and stop the rockets is Israeli aggression according to the leader of Hamas. Who's sitting comfortably in Damascus.
Khaled Meshal, the Damascus-based head of the Hamas political office, insisted Monday on a swap of Palestinian prisoners for the captured Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit.
"Our people… are united on the insistence to swap the captured soldier with prisoners in the jails of the Zionist enemy," said the exiled Hamas leader during a rare press conference from the Syrian capital.
He said that Shalit is a "prisoner of war and international conventions and laws should be applied to his case."
He blamed Israel for the collapse of Egyptian, Qatari and European mediation efforts to solve the crisis over the soldier.
"These efforts hit snags over Israel's insistence on the release of the Israeli soldier and its refusal to release Palestinian prisoners," he said.
"This is not a solution … We don't want escalation. We are for a peaceful, quiet resolution."
"The solution is simple: an exchange. But Israel refuses that," he said, adding that the Israelis are "under an illusion" if they think that by escalating their Gaza offensive they will win the soldier's release.
Meshal criticized the West for keeping silent on the IDF offensive to free the captured soldier.
"The Palestinian people are facing consecutive strikes by the Zionist, aggressive and terrorist entity," he said.
"Today, Israel is really terrorizing our people… Israel and America, which talked too much about this terrorism in past are the worst, severest and ugliest examples of terrorism."
Ah yes, the silence of the west. Like the criticism by the UN and the EU? All this posing and posturing to shift responsibility away from Hamas' own aggression in this matter. Meshal sits nice and cozy in Damascus while the war he brought down on his people is borne by them.
UPDATE: Oddly, in the comment section there is a European reaction blaming Israel, but Omar at Iraq the Model has an Iraqi roundup of opinion that almost universally condemns Hamas. Funny world, isn't it?
