Hamas leader calls on Muslim states to supply weapons to Palestinian fighters

“We see countries of the world pouring weapons into the occupation [Israel]… The time has come [for Muslim states] to support the resistance with weapons, because this is… not the battle of the Palestinian people alone,” said Haniyeh.

Haniyeh stated the Israeli military is failing to achieve any of its stated goals after nearly 100 days of attacking Gaza.

Instead, he added, the only success has been revealing its “bloody, murderous face to the whole world after committing all these massacres”.

Speaking at an International Union of Muslim Scholars conference in Doha, Qatar, the Palestinian leader said Gaza’s population’s steadfastness had stopped Israel from achieving its goals.

“The declared goals of the war on Gaza are to eliminate the Hamas movement, retrieve the prisoners, and implement a displacement plan,” Haniyeh added.

“I tell you that the enemy, despite the destruction and massacres, has failed to achieve any of the goals of the war.”

Haniyeh reiterated the group’s stance that Hamas will only release Israeli hostages from Gaza after all Palestinian prisoners are released from Israel’s prisons.

“They will absolutely not retrieve their captives except after all our prisoners in occupation prisons are released,” he stated.

Haniyeh added that Israel “was not able to retrieve a single captive, except only after the resistance accepted the truce agreement”.

105 people were released by Hamas during a temporary truce with Israel, which started on November 24 and ended early December 1. In exchange, 240 Palestinians were freed from Israeli prisons, mainly women and minors, and many of whom had been detained but never charged.

Israel has pounded the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on Oct. 7, killing more than 23,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring nearly 59,000 others, according to local health authorities.

The onslaught has left Gaza in ruins, with 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure damaged or destroyed and nearly 2 million residents displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine.

About 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s initial attack on Israel.