by MEMRI
Following the June 27, 2017 Israeli airstrikes in Gaza in response to the firing of a rocket from Gaza into Israel, articles in the Gulf press attacked Hamas and the countries that support it: Qatar, Iran and Turkey. The articles – published against the backdrop of the inter-Gulf tension and the Boycott imposed on Qatar, chiefly by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt – blamed Hamas of the firing of the rocket into Israel, and claimed that it was escalating the situation in Gaza on purpose in order to serve the interests of its three patron countries. These countries, said the articles, place innocent Palestinians in danger in order to divert global attention away from the Gulf crisis.The articles – blamed Hamas of the firing of the rocket into Israel, and claimed that it was escalating the situation in Gaza on purpose in order to serve the interests of its three patron countries.
The following are excerpts from two articles on this topic:
Muhammad Al-Hamadi, editor of the UAE daily Al-Ittihad,
wrote: "On June 27, without any warning, the Arabs woke up to discover
that Gaza had been bombarded. Why? What has happened that we don't know
about? What did the Gazan Palestinians do to find themselves under
Israeli fire? Has a third intifada broken out? Has the battle for the
liberation of Jerusalem begun?
"In practice, none [of the above]
happened. All [that happened was] that those who trade in the
Palestinian problem, who are themselves in trouble, remembered an old
bargaining chip that they have long been using successfully, [and
decided] to use it in the dire circumstances that have befallen their
friend Qatar, which serves as their open bank [account]. They thought
that [using this bargaining chip] would be a good way to divert the
Arabs' attention away from Qatar and focus it [instead] on Gaza and its
residents who are being bombarded with missiles by the Israeli enemy.
"This conduct of Qatar and its allies, in
Palestine and elsewhere, is despicable. How disgraceful it is that some
are willing to toy with the lives of innocents and with the future of
small children in Gaza in order to achieve political aims. For a long
time now, some [elements] – chiefly Iran, Qatar and Turkey – have been
toying with the Palestinian cause and they were successful, but the cost
was high: hundreds and even thousands of innocent Palestinians who have
been martyred or wounded and crippled. What was the [Palestinian's]
reward? The reward was a donation drive among Arab and Muslim countries
that raised millions. [But only] a handful of riyals and dinars was
handed out to the disaster-stricken Palestinians. It is always the case
that the [Gazan] people get crumbs, while the rest goes to the loyal
partner, Hamas.
"We have said from the beginning of the
boycott of Qatar that the game is over, but Qatar apparently isn't
listening. Continuing this transparently [wicked] behavior will no
longer avail [it], because the peoples are no longer fooled. If in the
past they trusted the propaganda of the ideologically recruited
Al-Jazeera channel, which serves certain goals, today the peoples no
longer watch Al-Jazeera and are no longer influenced by it and by other
Arab or foreign channels. Information has become very accessible, and
[cyber]space has opened up in [this] era of new media. Nobody has a
monopoly on the facts, and it is no longer possible to deceive the
peoples. That is what the Palestinian people discovered on July 27. It
discovered that there are those who want to exploit it and drag it into a
new confrontation with the Israeli enemy, while those who plan [the
confrontation] stay in five-star hotels in Doha and Istanbul and in
other capitals that shelter the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and of
terror.
"Our friends in Gaza informed us that the
[Gaza] Strip was not bombarded and that only two Israeli missiles were
fired in response to the rocket fired from Gaza into Israel. Everyone
knows that Qatar is the one that is 'bombarded' and boycotted. Who gains
from the firing of the rocket and from the situation in which Gaza is
bombarded?"[i]
Saudi Columnist: Qatar, Iran Sponsor Hamas, Which Uses Gazans As Human Shields
Hani Al-Zahiri wrote in the Saudi 'Okaz
daily: "It has been centuries since our region has seen a political
gamble as terrible as the Iranian and Qatari regimes' [current] gamble
with the lives and the cause of the Palestinians. These two [regimes]
adopted the Muslim Brotherhood's Hamas organization, and supported it by
every means when it staged an uprising against the legal Palestinian
leadership [the PA] and took over Gaza, and then turned the innocent
residents [of Gaza] into a human shield for the Hamas leadership.
"The state of the Gaza Strip in the face
of the Israeli bombardments, which usually come in direct response to
Hamas actions, reminds us of [a situation in which] a man kidnaps a
girl and then provokes [the soldiers in] a military base to open fire on
him and uses the girl as a human shield. The kidnapper in this case is
Hamas and the girl is Gaza and its helpless people. The portly Hamas
leaders meet in Doha and Tehran, laugh around tables laden with
delicacies and order their young [fighters] to open the gates of Hell to
the Palestinians by [shooting] firecrackers – which they call 'rockets'
– at Israeli [army] posts, so that Gaza will be bombarded and women,
children and the elderly will die. Then Hamas [officials] will come out,
condemn this on satellite channels, and demand support and funds to
rescue the Palestinian people, before going back to their feast, safe
and sound. In the meantime the entire world will watch the suffering of
an unarmed people that has no means to defend itself.
"Everything that has happened to the
Palestinians since Hamas took over them indicates that their second
enemy, after Israel, is Qatar and Iran, which are using a tinderbox
named Hamas to burn them in order to achieve purely political aims...
The question now is why, on the day before yesterday [June 26], Qatar
and its allies prompted Hamas to fire on Israeli positions, thus
inviting Israel to respond by bombarding Gaza. The answer is clearly
that this was a despicable attempt and a new political gamble by the
Qatari regime, aimed at easing the noose of the Gulf boycott [of Qatar, a
boycott] which prompted calls to sue [this regime] in the international
[court] for the black [crime] of supporting terror. Today [Qatar]
desperately needs to divert the world's attention in another direction,
even at the expense of the life and blood of a defenseless people... The
Qataris and Iranians will exploit the event to utter phrases of
pretended sympathy for the Palestinians, but only the people in Gaza
know that they are the victims of this pair of plotters [Qatar and
Iran]."[ii]
MEMRI
Source: https://www.memri.org/reports/articles-gulf-press-escalation-gaza-%E2%80%93-result-qatar-iran-turkey-toying-lives-innocent
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