Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad insisted that resistance™ is “legitimate right™Â” after militants criticised the wordÂ’s omission from his cabinet programme, Egyptian state media reported on Monday. “We are an occupied nation and resistance™ is the legitimate right™ of the Palestinian people”, the official MENA news agency quoted Fayyad as saying in Cairo late on Sunday.
Radical groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Sunday slammed FayyadÂ’s failure to mention resistance™ in his cabinet programme as abandoning “the mother of all principles of the Palestinian people, accepted and recognised by everybody.”
Fayyad, a respected economist and former employee of the World Bank, was appointed to head the Palestinian cabinet after the Islamist Hamas movement overran the Gaza Strip in a bloody takeover on June 15. But while Fayyad repeated the Palestinian right to resistance™, he also said that “what happened in Gaza was unacceptable as it was a coup against legitimacy.” His cabinet programme, which was published over the weekend, does not contain the term “resistance™,” used by the Palestinians to describe armed struggle™ against Israeli occupation. The term was included in the programme of the previous Palestinian cabinet headed by Hamas premier Ismail Haniya. |