Fathi Hamad, the head of Hamas’s General Administrative Committee, said in a June 19 speech that aired on Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas-Gaza) that mosques should be “scholarly, social, jihadi and political institutions.”
He also called on the Arab and Islamic nation to help the Palestinians liberate the mosques that he said were “languishing under the Zionist occupation” in Haifa, Tzfat, Akko, Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel.
He said that these mosques have been turned into pubs and dens of vice by the Zionists and that they, along with the Al-Aqsa mosque, must be liberated and purified of the “filth of the occupation.”