Hamas adding to its charter in bid to end isolation

Supplement urges ‘Palestinian state in the 1967 borders’

GAZA // Hamas is to unveil a new version of its founding charter, which called for the destruction of Israel, in a bid to ease its international isolation.

Leaders of the Islamist movement have long spoken of the more limited aim of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip without explicitly setting it out in its charter.

But after years of sometimes bitter internal debate, the party leadership is to publish a supplementary charter at a conference in Qatar tomorrow that will formally accept the idea of a state in the territories occupied by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967.

In a bow to hardliners within the movement, the original 1988 charter will not be dropped, but supplemented. There will be no recognition of Israel as demanded by the international community.

The new document will clearly present the objective of establishing a “sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital in the 1967 borders”, said a senior Hamas official.

“It does not constitute in any way a recognition of the Zionist entity,” the official said.

Leading Hamas official Bassem Naim said the new document was the fruit of four years of discussion within the movement, which has fought three wars with Israel since it seized control of Gaza in 2007. Another Hamas leader, Ahmed Yusef, said the updated charter was “more moderate, more measured and would help protect us against accusations of racism, anti-Semitism and breaches of international law”.

It would “differentiate between Jews as a religious community on the one hand, and the occupation and Zionist entity on the other”, he said. But hardliner Mahmud Zahar insisted there would be no change in the party’s commitment to armed resistance against Israel, which has put it on the terrorism blacklists of the European Union and the United States. He said the new document was “a tool for the future but it does not mean we’re changing our principles”.

“The resistance remains and we will fight Israel with all our might.”

Hamas swept to power in Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, but the international community refused to deal with any government in which it participated until it renounced violence and recognised Israel and past peace agreements.

The resulting deadlock led to mounting friction between Hamas and the rival Fatah movement of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, which culminated in its seizure of Gaza. The senior Hamas source said the new charter was also intended to give a boost to reconciliation efforts between the two factions, which still run rival administrations in the West Bank and Gaza. The new document defines the movement’s goals as “political and not religious”, easing its entry into the Palestine Liberation Organisation, led by Mr Abbas.

It describes Hamas as a “Palestinian national liberation and resistance movement with religious references”, said the official said.

The new charter also abandons past references to the Muslim Brotherhood, to which it was closely linked when formed.

Hamas “is trying to change in the eyes of the international community and the Arab world”, said Gaza political analyst Mukhaimer Abu Saada. “It could encourage some states already interacting with Hamas to formalise their relations,” Mr Abu Saada

But he said the charter supplement was unlikely to repair Hamas’s relations with the EU or the US.

“If it does not accept the twostate solution, the international community will not remove it from its terror lists.”