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Moles.. Cancer Eating Away At Palestinian Body: Analysts
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Meshaal decided to withhold the name of Hamas new leader in Gaza for security reasons
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By
Mohammad Al-Astal, IOL Correspondent
GAZA
CITY
, April 19 (IslamOnline.net) – Moles for the Israeli occupation
troops are a cancer eating away at the Palestinian body, a cohort of
Palestinian analysts warned, following Israeli latest successes in
assassinating Palestinian leaders.
“Let’s
keep the issue in perspective,” researcher Mohammad Ayoub told
IslamOnline.net Sunday, April 18. “Some Palestinians are
collaborating with the enemy.”
“But
it is limited in comparison with different hot spots worldwide, like
Yugoslavia
during the Nazi era, when one out of every five Yugoslavs was an
agent.”
He,
however, refused to play down the adverse effect of the issue on the
Palestinians “who all joined forces with the resistance”.
Ayoub
partially put the blame on the resistance factions’ “poor security
sense” and “negligence”.
“The
operatives’ tips play into the hands of the occupation troops, who
translate them into action,” he said.
“But
state-of-the-art espionage technology is also a key player,” he
added.
The
stark warning followed a series of Israeli assassinations of leading
Palestinian resistance figures, the latest of whom Hamas spiritual
leader Sheikh
Ahmad Yassin and the group’s leader in Gaza Abdelaziz Rantissi,
who was
killed Saturday, April 17, in a missile strike.
Palestinian
Authority
The
researcher also criticized the Palestinian Authority for failing to
arrest and punish those agents (moles).
“It
seems as if the PA has lost its touch with the Palestinian people,”
he charged.
Abdel
Sattar Qasim, professor of politics in
An-Najah
University
in
Nablus
, agreed that the PA has contributed to the spreading phenomenon.
He
accused the PA of “respecting and beefing up the agents and
lavishing official posts on them, while stripping the honest of their
rights”.
“The
PA is capitulating to the Israeli security requirements. If it had not
bowed, it would have not come to surface in the first place,” he
believed.
He
called for changing the “founding regulations” of the PA due to
its “blatant dereliction of duty, intentionally or
unintentionally”.
Qasim
also called on the Palestinians to act in unison to uproot the
phenomenon.
Cancer
Riyad
Al-Astal, the director of the
International
Center
for Research and Studies in
Gaza
, described the matter as a “cancer gnawing away at the body of the
Palestinians”.
“It
must be removed, once and for all,” he told IOL, referring to the
liquidation of agents if needs be.
He
said the core of the issue lies in the fact that the occupation has
eyes in every nook and crony inside the Palestinian territories, let
alone high-tech monitoring devices.
There
are no specific statistics on the number of the agents; however, some
analysts put the figure at between 30,000 to 40,000 collaborators. A
A
study revealed in February that Israeli occupation forces have
assassinated a total of 438 Palestinians since the start of the
second Intifada against occupation in
September 28, 2000
till the end of 2003.
The
most prominent of those assassinated by
Israel
was Abu
Ali Mustafa, the secretary general of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who was targeted by an Israeli Apache
helicopter gunships in the
West Bank
city of
Ramallah
on
August 27, 2001
.
On
July 22, 2002
, Israeli F16 warplanes shelled the house of Salah Shehada, head of
the Hamas military wing in
Gaza
city, killing
him with 15 civilians in one of the most barbaric Israeli attacks.
Following
the assassination of Rantissi, Hamas appointed a successor to its
leader in
Gaza
but kept
his name under wraps for fear he might be targeted by
Israel
.
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