Hamas chief kisses Gaza soil on first ever visit

8 December AFP

Hamas leader in exile Khaled Meshaal made his first visit to Gaza on Friday, kissing the ground and saying he hoped he would one day die a "martyr" in the Palestinian territory.

After his seven-vehicle convoy swept across the border from Egypt, Meshaal kissed Palestinian soil before embracing Gaza's Hamas premier Ismail Haniya.Green Hamas flags and the red, white, green and black of the Palestinian flag flew everywhere to mark the unprecedented visit, timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Islamist movement's founding.

Meshaal was accompanied by his deputy Mussa Abu Marzuk and other officials on a trip that came just two weeks after the end of a deadly confrontation with Israel that began on November 14 with an air strike that killed Hamas military commander Ahmed Jaabari.

Meshaal was taken to see the charred remains of Jaabari's car, which had been transported to Rafah on the Egyptian border especially for the visit.

"I hope God will make me a martyr on the land of Palestine in Gaza," he said. Security was tight across the territory, with masked militants from Hamas military wing the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades out in force, wearing fatigues and carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles as they patrolled the roads along which Meshaal's convoy was to travel. "This is the first time that I am coming to Palestine in 37 years," said Meshaal who is originally from a village in the West Bank but went into exile with his family after the 1967 Middle East war, only returning for a brief visit in 1975. It was his first visit to Gaza.

"This is my third birth," he told reporters at a brief news conference, saying his second was after he escaped an Israeli attempt to kill him in Jordan in 1997. The convoy then headed for Gaza City through streets decked with Hamas flags and the red flags of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which on December 11 marks its 45th anniversary. Meshaal's delegation paid a brief visit to a home destroyed by an Israeli air strike in the Zeitun neighbourhood before heading to the house of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated by Israel in 2004.

There, Meshaal promised to "walk down the route of reconciliation, bury the division (with Fatah) and empower unity in order to be aligned as one in face the Zionist entity," noting that Yassin was a long-life "advocate of reconciliation and national unity, as well as resistance."