The leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s second-largest faction said Sunday that his group’s attacks against Israel will not only continue but intensify.
Speaking in Damascus, George Habash said his Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine will attack Israelis in the administered territories and within Israel’s borders.
He also warned Palestinian residents of the territories not to support Israeli efforts to end the uprising and set up an alternative leadership to the PLO.
His statement came one week after Habash stated in an interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper that the Palestinian population in the territories “still doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist” and has not backed a two-state solution to the Israeli-Arab dispute.
In an interview that appeared in the newspaper Al-Seyassah on April 4, Habash also repeated his vow that he would “not relinquish even 1 percent of Palestine.”
He added, “In light of the fact that the Zionist movement is a colonial, racist, imperialist movement, we have no choice but to continue the struggle, or surrender.”
Habash also denied that the Palestine National Council had recognized Israel’s right to exist when it declared an independent Palestinian state during its meeting last November in Tunis.
“It was not so. I can honestly state that no agreement was achieved concerning the recognition of Israel’s right to exist,” he said.
He interpreted the independence document as declaring “a Palestinian state on Palestinian land, a state which we will rely upon in order to continue the struggle — in order to rout the Zionist plot of Palestine.”
Habash’s faction voted against the declaration in November. But he was quoted as saying at the time that he would abide by whatever decision the PNC had reached.
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