Hamas slams Israel’s annexation plans, warns of massive uprising in West Bank

“Jerusalem [al-Quds] will remain a Palestinian, Arab and Islamic city and the eternal capital of the Palestinian state, and all powers on this planet will not be able to change its identity, address and history,” Hamas’s Jerusalem Affairs Office said in a statement on Sunday.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing a number of criminal indictments, has repeatedly said that he would commence plans for annexing more areas in the occupied West Bank on July 1, in accordance with American President Donald Trump’s peace scheme, further infuriating Palestinians.

Trump officially unveiled his much-condemned Mideast plan, the so-called deal of the century, in January at the White House with Netanyahu on his side, while Palestinian representatives were not invited.

The proposal largely gives in to Israel’s demands while creating a Palestinian state with limited control over its own security and borders, enshrining the occupied Jerusalem al-Quds as “Israel’s undivided capital” and allowing the regime to annex settlements in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley.

The future Palestinian state, according to Trump’s scheme, will consist of scattered lands linked together via bridges and tunnels, and furthermore, it will also be demilitarized, meaning that it will be subject to Israeli control over its security.

Trump’s highly provocative scheme, which further denies the right of return for Palestinian refugees to their homeland, is also in complete disregard of UN Security Council resolutions and rejected by the vast majority of the international community.

“The occupation and its plots against Jerusalem [al-Quds] and Palestine will be doomed to failure and its conspiracies will not secure a future for its existence on the Palestinian land,” Hamas added on in its statement.

The statement came two days after the Naksa Day, which marks the displacement of Palestinian people after Israel prevailed in the Six Day War in June 1967.

“On the Naksa anniversary, the Palestinian cause is still beset with liquidation plots, the latest of which is the ominous deal of the century that was orchestrated by the Zio-American administration,” the resistance movement further said.

Hamas also sounded that alarm as some countries had already begun into the “flagrant stage of normalizing relations” with the Tel Aviv regime “through political, economic, cultural, sports and artistic trajectories in defiance of the dignity and will of the Arab and Muslim peoples who have long supported the Palestinian people in their long struggle with the Zionist enemy.”

Palestinian officials have already threatened to sever bilateral agreements with Tel Aviv if it goes ahead with the annexation that will definitely undermine the two-state solution. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has already said that the US proposal “belongs to the dustbin of history.”

Elsewhere in its statement, the resistance movement also urged the Palestinian Authority, led by Abbas, to fully disengage from the “disastrous” Oslo Accords and its political, economic and security obligations and to sever all the remaining ties with the Israeli regime.

The Oslo Accords were signed by late chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, and former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 and 1995. The declared goal of the accords was to achieve peace based on the UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, and to realize the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.