Saleh al-Arouri, the Hamas terror chief who masterminded the 2014 kidnapping and killing of 3 Israeli teens, said that Hamas has signed a reconciliation agreement with Fatah so that all Palestinian parties can “work together against the Zionist enterprise,” The Times of Israel reported Thursday.
Under the agreement, the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority is to resume full control of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip by December 1, according to Egyptian sources. Hamas seized control of Gaza from Abbas’s Fatah in a violent coup in 2007 and has since refused to disarm.
Speaking after the agreement was signed, al-Arouri, who served as lead negotiator during the talks, said Palestinian reconciliation was crucial “so that we can all work together against the Zionist enterprise, which seeks to wipe out and trample the rights of our people.”
He added that “We in Hamas are determined, serious and sincere this time and every time to end the division. We have adopted the strategy of one step at a time so that the reconciliation will succeed.”
The exact terms of the agreement were not immediately clear. Israeli radio reported that under the unity deal, Hamas would not be required to disarm, as previously requested by Abbas. The terror group was said to have instead agreed that it would not use its weapons arsenal unless authorized by a joint Hamas-Fatah panel. It is also unknown what would become of Hamas’s 25,000-strong military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.
In a conference call with The Israel Project on October 2, Avi Issacharoff, a longtime Palestinian affairs correspondent, told the audience that if Hamas refuses to give up its weapons, reconciliation will never be accepted by Israel.
Al-Arouri, who served as the terror group’s head of West Bank operations, was recently appointed as the organization’s deputy political leader, in a move which was widely interpreted as toughening the Islamist movement’s posture in reconciliation talks with Fatah.
Al-Arouri is the mastermind behind a long list of terrorist attacks. In June 2014, a Hamas cell in the West Bank kidnapped and murdered Israeli teenagers Eyal Yifrach, Gil-ad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel and Israeli authorities suspected al-Arouri of coordinating the abductions. Al-Arouri later took credit for the kidnapping and killing in the name of Hamas.
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