Mahmoud al-Habash, a senior adviser to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, threatened that Israeli soldiers, who remain in Gaza after the war against Hamas, will become a “legitimate target for various actions” by Gazans.
“There is no alternative to the Palestinian Authority in Gaza,” al-Habash told Omri Haim, Arab affairs correspondent at Channel 14 News, on Monday. “Neither Netanyahu nor the Netanyahu government are the owners of Gaza.”
“If Israel remains in the Gaza Strip, it will be considered an occupying power and dealt with as an occupying power, including through popular resistance,” al-Habash added.
The Palestinian Authority’s top Sharia judge and a former minister of awqaf (“endowment”) and religious affairs, al-Habash said in a September 2024 interview that he views terror attacks as “resistance,” claiming that such a response is “the right of every Palestinian to defend himself.”
The latest comments by Abbas’s confidant came in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s renewed rejection of any role for the Samaria-based Palestinian Authority in post-war Gaza governance.
“Just as I have committed to, on the day after the war in Gaza, there will be neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority,” Netanyahu stated on Monday. “I am committed to U.S. President Trump’s plan for the creation of a different Gaza.”
Trump’s plan envisions relocating the Strip’s 2 million residents and undertaking a clearing and reconstruction process under U.S. oversight.
