The video has been circulating virally on social networks since the Hamas attack on Saturday October 7, 2023, which triggered a new war in Gaza. We see one of the main leaders of Hamas, Mahmoud al-Zahar, wishing that “the entire planet” would be under Islamic law. “There will be no more Jews or Christian traitors,” says the executive of the Palestinian movement, according to the English translation added as subtitles to the video.
These comments, widely relayed on Considered a terrorist organization by the European Union and the United States, Hamas was compared to Daesh by the Israeli Prime Minister the day after the attack. In France, an LFI MP described the Palestinian group as a “resistance movement”, triggering a controversy and the referral, by the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin, to the public prosecutor for “apology of terrorism”.
This extract from an interview with one of the leaders of Hamas is therefore instructive on how to conceive the fight for the liberation of Palestine defended by Hamas. Or in any case, defended by a certain section of the movement because Mahmoud al-Zahar, considered one of the founders of Hamas, embodies one of the most radical sections.
Born in 1945 in Gaza City, Mahmoud al-Zahar co-founded Hamas in 1987, before being arrested and imprisoned for six months in Israeli prisons. He then participated in the first government of the Palestinian Authority led by Hamas in 2006. The original Gazan also reportedly lost two sons. The first is believed to have died in 2003 during an Israeli strike on al-Zahar’s home. The second, a member of the al-Qassam brigades, also died in an IDF strike in 2008.
The video relayed on Middle East Media Research Institute whose stated objective is to “bridge the language barrier between the Middle East and the West”.
The structure, founded by a former member of the Israeli intelligence services, has however often been criticized for its bias through translations which have sometimes been incomplete, although it claims to be “non-partisan”.
Le Figaro therefore verified by carrying out a new translation of the Hamas leader’s words, spoken in literary Arabic. “When […] we talk about the battle of ’the promise of eternity’, we are not saying that we are going to liberate only our land, we are also saying that we believe in what our prophet Mohammad, that peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said: ‘God has shown me our Land, I have seen its east and its west, and the property of my nation will reach all that was shown to me’ .”
Mahmoud al-Zahar then goes on to conclude: “So the 510 million square kilometers, which are the surface area of the planet, will live in a situation where there is no oppression, no subjugation, no betrayal, no Zionism, no perfidious Christianity , nor murders on this scale, like those committed against the Palestinian people and all Arab peoples in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and all other Arab countries.
The co-founder of the terrorist movement also took responsibility, in a rare interview given to the Middle East correspondent of the British television channel Sky News in 2021, for Hamas’ rocket attacks on Israel. And when asked by the journalist about Israel’s right to exist, Mahmoud al-Zahar replied: “No. For what ? For what ? You come from America and you take my house. You come from Britain and you take my brother’s house. It’s a colony. You are not a citizen. We are the owners. It’s an Arab area. It’s a well-known, well-known Islamic area.”