Hamas leader Marzouk says no peace with Israel

Moussa Abu Marzouk, group's number two figure, said any potential deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, even if ratified in a Palestinian referendum, would be considered only as a temporary truce. “We will not recognize Israel as a state,” he told the Jewish Daily Forward, a Jewish-American newspaper in an interview published on Thursday. It was the first such interview by a senior Hamas leader to a Jewish publication. Israeli newspapers reported it on Friday. Hamas has ruled Gaza since expelling rival Fatah forces in 2007. The Palestinian Authority, headed by Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas, rules parts of the West Bank. Abu Marzouk's remarks emphasized the doctrinaire position of the group's exiled leadership, ruling out accommodation with Israel. Some local Hamas figures have hinted they would accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as a first stage toward the eventual elimination of Israel. Some see that as a way for Hamas to finesse its official position, which does not recognize a place for a Jewish state in an Islamic Middle East. editor of the Jewish Daily Forward wrote that he met with Abu Marzouk in Cairo. The Hamas leadership left its longtime base in Syria because of the unrest there. “Why am I here?” Larry Cohler-Esses of the Forward asked Abu Marzouk at the beginning of the interview. “We don't have ... something against the Jew as a religion or against the Jew as a human being,” Abu Marzouk said. “The problem is that the Israelis kicked out my family. They have occupied my land and injured thousands of Palestinians.”