All the attempts at normalization won't change the reality. There is no place for the (Israeli) enemy on the map. The people are sending an angry message to all those who are normalizing (with Israel)," said Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on October 29, 2018.
Haniyeh was referring to the stunning developments in recent weeks when Israeli ministers paid official visits to Arab Gulf states and Israeli athletes participated in an international Judo competition in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
The Hamas leader, who Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said was a dead man walking a long time ago, “denounced the acceleration of normalization with the Israeli entity, especially in light of the increasing crimes of the occupation and its daily violations against the Palestinian people and their sanctities through the Judaization of Jerusalem and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank.”
Haniyeh wasn’t the only Palestinian leader who condemned the re-approachment between Israel and the Sunni Arab Arab Gulf states.
Fatah leader Mounir al-Jagoub also strongly condemned the unprecedented Arab-Israeli contacts and said “the normalization with the occupation without Israel's recognition of the Palestinian and Arab rights (to the land of Israel), the return of the occupied Arab territories and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the borders of June 4 with East Jerusalem as its capital” was unacceptable.
Daoud Shihab a spokesman for the Iranian-backed Palestinian terror group Islamic Jihad went a step further and claimed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s visit to Oman was a “stab in the back of the Palestinian people” and “tantamount to acquittal and washing the hands of this criminal of the blood of innocent children who shed their blood every day on the land of Palestine.”
