Hamas Says Anti-Tunnel Barrier Displaces Thousands Of Underground Palestinians

“Thousands of my family members live underground in that area.”

Gaza City, April 25 – Leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian officials decried Israel’s construction of a subterranean wall to block infiltration from the Gaza Strip, accusing the Jewish State of continuing its policy of expelling Palestinians, this time the Palestinians who reside underground where the barrier is under construction.

Excavation and and construction began in earnest last month on the barrier, which the IDF claims is a necessary measure to counter the threat of terrorists using tunnels to enter Israel and commit violent acts. A Hamas spokesman and several other high-ranking Palestinian figures lambasted Israel for conducting the work, which by necessity would displace untold numbers of Palestinians who until now resided peacefully in the underground areas slated for the barrier.

“This is yet another war crime in the growing litany of Zionist atrocities,” charged Mahmoud al-Zahar of Hamas. “Countless Palestinians have been rendered refugees at the hands of the ape-pig Jew invaders – that is, if the monsters implementing this policy even gave our innocent brethren time to move. The Palestinian people will not sit idly as this ethnic cleansing continues.” Al-Zahar declined to specify the form of resistance his organization will pursue, but tens of thousands of Palestinian rockets at Israeli communities have characterized protests in Gaza for the last two decades.

“The international community must condemn this war crime and act to stop it,” echoed Fatah official Saeb Erekat. “Thousands of my family members live underground in that area, and their cruel displacement by Israel once again demonstrates Netanyahu is not serious about peaceful resolution of the conflict. We call on the Security Council to impose sanctions on Israel at once.”

Human Rights Watch issued a condemnation. “This barbarity cannot continue,” tweeted the organization’s director, Ken Roth. “The world must act to prevent this suffering, and those who caused it must be held accountable.”

An IDF representative claimed no knowledge of underground-dwelling Palestinians in the area, but Roth dismissed that statement as evasion. “We’re all too familiar with the Israeli tactic of downplaying or minimizing the numbers of Arabs who lived in Palestine before Zionism,” he contended. “They point to such things as Ottoman and British census reports, traveler journals, and myriad other piece of ‘evidence’ in an attempt to deny the Palestinian narrative of victimhood and displacement, as if such notions as ‘population’ and ‘numbers’ have any bearing on reality. The Israeli refusal to accept the idyllic Palestinian past is itself a crime.”

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