Hezbollah urges Hamas members and officials to ‘leave Lebanon immediately.
Lebanese Shiite movement’s decision comes as response to Hamas’ role in ongoing war against Assad regime in Syria.
BEIRUT - The powerful Lebanese Shiite
movement Hezbollah called on Hamas members and officials who are still
present in Lebanon to leave the country 'immediately and within hours.'
The decision comes as a response to the Palestinian Islamist movement’s
role in the ongoing war in Syria against the regime of President Bashar
al-Assad.
Media sources close to the Palestinian
national liberation movement Fatah in Lebanon said a Hezbollah senior
security official informed Hamas representative in Lebanon, Ali Baraka,
that all of those related to Hamas on the Lebanese territory became have
become unwelcome.
The military unit of Hamas has
broken ties with former ally Syrian President Bashar Assad and has begun
training members of the opposition’s Free Syrian Army in Damascus,
according to a report by The Times of London.
Anonymous
diplomatic sources told the Times, earlier this month, that members of
the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades were training Free Syrian Army units in
the rebel-held neighborhoods of Yalda, Jaramana and Babbila in the
Syrian capital.
“The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades have
been training units very close to Damascus. These are specialists. They
are really good,” a Western diplomat with contacts in both the Assad
regime and the Syrian opposition told the London daily newspaper.
According
to the Times, Hamas has been helping the rebels in digging a tunnel
beneath Damascus in preparation for an attack on the city, a skill that
Hamas has honed by constructing tunnels to smuggle supplies from Egypt
into the Gaza Strip.
A Palestinian source from
Lebanon’s Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp reportedly said that
Hamas’s aid to the rebels is common knowledge, however Hamas officials
have denied any affiliation with Syrian rebels.
The
political bureau of Hamas was situated in Damascus. The organization’s
leaders enjoyed the protective patronage of the Syrian regime and aid
from Hezbollah.
By late December 2011, when the Syrian
uprising started shifting into high gear, Khaled Mashaal, Hamas’s top
political leader, quietly left Damascus in February last year and
relocated to Qatar.
That same month, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh allegedly declared the movement’s support for the Syrian opposition.
Syrian state-run media accused Mashaal of being “ungrateful and treacherous.”
As
far as Khaled Meshaal is concerned, the underlying logic is simple: His
movement’s new patron and funder, the Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al
Thani, is a vocal opponent of Assad’s regime.
