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| Obama plunges into ME with snap call to Abbas |
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Palestinian resistance has right to arms, says Iran; Israel completes withdrawal from Gaza Strip
Thursday, January 22, 2009
GAZA CITYOCCUPIED-AL-QUDS /TEHRAN: Hamas on Wednesday called on President Barack Obama to learn lessons from the mistakes of his predecessor George W Bush and said it would judge the new US leader by his acts.
“We will judge him by his policies and actions on the ground and how he will learn lessons from the mistakes of the previous administrations, especially that of George Bush and his criminal and unjust policies,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum told a press conference in Gaza City.
President Barack Obama plunged straight into the Middle East conflict on his first day in office calling the Palestinian president on Wednesday after the last Israeli soldier withdrew from Gaza.
Obama assured Mahmoud Abbas that he intended “to work with him as partners to establish a durable peace in the region,” the Palestinian leader’s spokesman told AFP. The new US leader told Abbas that the Palestinian president was the first foreign leader he called since taking office, said spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina.
“This is my first phone call to a foreign leader and I’m making it only hours after I took office,” he quoted Obama as telling Abbas.
Obama and his secretary of state-designate Hillary Clinton had vowed to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict immediately after taking office. There was no confirmation if Obama also called Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, while a close Abbas aide admitted surprise at the speed with which Obama moved.
“We were not expecting such a quick call from President Obama but we knew how serious he is about the Palestinian problem,” said Yasser Abed Rabbo.
During his inauguration speech on Tuesday, Obama pledged a new approach to the Muslim world saying “we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”
Israel completed its pull out during the morning, the fourth day of a ceasefire that ended a 22-day genocidal assault on Hamas, leaving over 1,300 Palestinians dead and a trail of horrendous devastation.
“The last soldier left the Gaza Strip this morning,” an army spokesman told AFP. “However the army remains deployed all around the Gaza Strip to meet any eventuality.”
An Israel Defence Forces statement said all troops had returned to Israeli territory ending Operation Cast Lead against the Islamist movement. “The forces are now redeployed outside the Gaza Strip.”
But Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum said the pullout “is not enough and does not resolve the crisis.
“We demand the total lifting of the blockade and the re-opening of all the crossing points so that our people can live in peace and security,” he told AFP.
The Islamists asked all its civil servants to return to work although the main ministries’ building in Gaza City is rubble.
Palestinian health ministry figures list more than 1,300 dead, including 410 children and 100 women. Another 5,300 people were wounded. The statistics bureau reported 4,100 homes totally destroyed and 17,000 others damaged.
In Cairo, President Hosni Mubarak urged Obama to make the Palestinian question an “urgent priority” saying it is “key to all the other difficult crises of the Middle East.” However, Israel is not expecting a significant change in US Middle East policy, deputy Prime Minister Chaim Ramon said.
“This policy has two principles: the struggle against terrorism and the need to achieve peace on the basis of two states,” he said.
In a related development, Iran said on Wednesday resistance groups like those in Gaza had the right to have weapons to fight” colonialists”. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki did not say the Islamic Republic itself would offer military support but said it was natural Palestinians would defend themselves and their land.
He said Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were war criminals who should be prosecuted. Turning to internal Palestinian adivisions, Mottaki said President Mahmoud Abbas’ ”time is up” and new elections should be held.
“A government or a people who would like to defend themselves, it is very natural they will do their utmost to get weapons from whatever place possible,” Mottaki said in a speech in Tehran in which he discussed Israel’s offensive against Gaza.
Hamas wrested control of the Gaza Strip from Abbas’s Palestinian Authority in 2007. Abbas, who still controls the West Bank, is seen as weak and ineffectual by leaders of some Arab countries like Syria, an ally of Iran.
Israel said it completed a troop withdrawal from the Hamas-ruled Gaza on Wednesday, three days after Israel and the Palestinian groups group declared separate ceasefires. Olmert has declared the mission accomplished, noting diplomatic efforts by the United States, Egypt and European nations to prevent Hamas rearming. Israel has vowed to respond to any renewed flow of arms to Gaza.
In an apparent reference to US backing for Israel, which Iran does not recognise and calls the “Zionist regime”, Mottaki said in the speech broadcast and translated by Iran’s Press TV:
“During this most recent savage attack against Gaza, you tendered 300 tonnes of bombs for the Zionist regime, and now you have the audacity to come out and say that the resistance shouldn’t have any weapons.”
The Foreign Ministry summoned a senior diplomat of the Czech Republic, which holds the rotating European Union presidency, to protest against the EU’s “indifference” and “silence” over the Gaza conflict, the official IRNA news agency said on Wednesday. Mottaki said Israel’s goals in Gaza had been to “wipe away the resistance and also to destroy the defensive capability of the resistance,” in a clear to reference to Hamas, but that it had failed.
“Resistance struggles around the world, those who struggle against colonialists, it is their right ... to stand up to attacks by the enemy,” he said. “And to do that it is their natural right to have access to weapons.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
