Gulf Press: Qatar, Iran Using Palestinians As Pawns

TEL AVIV – Following Tuesday’s strikes by the Israeli Air Force in Gaza in response to rocket fire, the Gulf press attacked Hamas and said the nations supporting it were using Palestinian lives as pawns to divert attention from their own countries.

The articles, which come at a time of tension between Qatar and its neighbors in the region, blamed Hamas for firing the rockets into Israel, and further claimed that the terror group was escalating the situation in Gaza with the cynical purpose of serving the interests of its three patrons – Iran, Qatar and Turkey.

Muhammad Al-Hamadi, editor of the UAE daily Al-Ittihad, wrote in Wednesday’s editorial that “those who trade in the Palestinian problem, who are themselves in trouble … thought that it would be a good way to divert the Arabs’ attention away from Qatar and focus it [instead] on Gaza and its residents who are being bombarded with missiles by the Israeli enemy.”

He added that while the Arab world, especially Hamas’ patron nations, cried wolf about Gaza having been bombarded by Israel on Tuesday, witnesses within the coastal enclave itself contradicted those reports, saying that the Gaza Strip “was not bombarded and that only two Israeli missiles were fired in response to the rocket fired from Gaza into Israel.”

“This conduct of Qatar and its allies, in Palestine and elsewhere, is despicable. How disgraceful it is that some are willing to toy with the lives of innocents and with the future of small children in Gaza in order to achieve political aims,” Al-Hamadi wrote in the article translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

According to Al-Hamadi, Iran, Qatar and Turkey are responsible for the “hundreds and even thousands of innocent Palestinians who have been martyred or wounded and crippled.”

He further claimed that millions of dollars are raised in those Arab and Muslim countries, ostensibly to assist the Palestinians, yet Gazans receive “only crumbs” from those donations, with the lion’s share going to those countries’ “loyal partner” Hamas.

Al-Hamadi slammed the propaganda spread by Qatar-based network Al Jazeera, but said that today people have stopped trusting it as a news source.

“Nobody has a monopoly on the facts, and it is no longer possible to deceive the peoples. That is what the Palestinian people discovered” this week, Al-Hamadi wrote. He states that the average Gazan is waking up to the fact that he is being exploited and dragged into a new confrontation with Israel, while those behind the escalation “stay in five-star hotels in Doha and Istanbul and in other capitals that shelter the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and of terror.”

Writing in Saudi Arabia’s Okaz newspaper, columnist Hani Al-Zahiri claimed that Hamas, and not Israel, is the Palestinians’ primary enemy because it turns ordinary civilians into human shields.

He slammed Iran and Qatar for their “terrible” policy of gambling with the lives and cause of the Palestinians. These two regimes, wrote Al-Zahiri, allowed Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood proxy, to “turn the innocent residents [of Gaza] into a human shield for the Hamas leadership.”

He continued by saying the Israeli strikes come as a direct response to Hamas rockets and used the metaphor of a kidnapped girl – with the young girl being Gaza and the kidnapper Hamas.

“The portly Hamas leaders meet in Doha and Tehran, laugh around tables laden with delicacies and order their young [fighters] to open the gates of hell to the Palestinians” by shooting rockets at Israel.

According to Al-Zahiri, Qatar and Iran are the ones setting off the “tinderbox” that is Hamas to attack Israel as part of “a despicable attempt and a new political gamble by the Qatari regime, aimed at easing the noose of the Gulf boycott.”