Anyone who opposes Hamas should be considered to be a traitor and should be dealt with accordingly, Al Jazeera’s political analyst Saeed Ziad said on Wednesday.
“Anyone who opposes or protests [against Hamas] should be treated not as a political rival but as a traitor,” Ziad wrote in a post on his X/Twitter account.“He added that these people should be dealt with under the Palestinian revolutionary law.”
Ziad referred to Hamas’s 2007 coup in Gaza, during which it slaughtered dozens of Palestinian Authority personnel, paving the way for it to remain the sole ruler in the Gaza Strip.He wrote that he opposed the “chaos and incitement to civil war taking place in the Gaza Strip,” echoing comments by Hamas leaders over the past couple of weeks, which attempted to paint any rejection of Hamas as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause and identity.
Hamas’s opponents, “along with the unprecedented societal division surrounding the effectiveness of armed resistance, are laying the foundations for a period that bears a striking resemblance to 2007, a year of chaos that ended in a swift military resolution within days,” he wrote.
Some major differences exist between the two periods, Ziad said, including that no other Palestinian military force exists in the Gaza Strip today, which is “a huge power gap in favor of the resistance [i.e., Hamas].”
The current “incitement” was not based on a political dispute but rather on the very topic of the “weapon of resistance” – meaning Hamas’s military rule in Gaza – he said.
“This grants the resistance greater societal legitimacy for decisive action, which imposes on the resistance the duty to deal with every instigator and participant on the basis of treason, not political disagreement, in accordance with the Palestinian revolutionary law,” Ziad continued.
He also accused Fatah of carrying out the “central nucleus of the incitement.”This radical Sunni Islamist group was not targeted in 2007 – only the “positions of the [PA] and its militias,” Ziad added.
For many years, Hamas granted Fatah “freedom of organizational, public, and student activity in Gaza,” Ziad said, adding that these protests would lead to the organization’s “uprooting from the Gaza Strip altogether.”
He ended his analysis by warning that Hamas was losing its patience and would resort to making “swift and decisive decisions.”
Condemnation – and doubling down
Ziad, who was born in Gaza and who now resides in Doha, caused an uproar last week when he said during one of his appearances on Al Jazeera that the Palestinians face only the choice of remaining steadfast and fighting with the “body parts and flesh of their children.”
His troubling remarks were even paraphrased during one of the anti-Hamas protests in Gaza last week. One protester held a sign that said: “Don’t bring up our children’s flesh – speak about your own children’s flesh, Saeed Ziad!”Despite receiving thousands of likes on his current post, many were critical of Ziad’s words, viewing them as a direct call to kill Fatah loyalists in Gaza.
A commenter named Amjad wrote: “Do you understand what you are writing and saying? You are inciting the killing of hundreds of thousands of people!”Amjad called Ziad “despicable” and “a criminal psychopath.”
A Fatah member named Muhammad wrote: “Uprooting the Fatah organization from its roots? Okay, try touching just one of the organization’s members.”
A commenter from Ramallah wrote: “Are your Qatari masters happy with this statement? Are you satisfied now?... You are a fool and a reckless Muslim Brotherhood member.Your words reflect a clear ignorance of the shifts in the balance of power in the Gaza Strip because Hamas has been weakened by its own stupidity, recklessness, and foolishness, and it is no longer able to do what it dreams of and what it tries to frighten the masses with. Those days are over.”
Nevertheless, Ziad doubled down on his comments, saying in a subsequent post that Fatah members should be thanking him for the advice he offered.“The Fatah group [is] weird!” he wrote. “You write to them, warning them of the consequences of the civil war that they are calling for... This is a strategic sin that will make them the enemies of the entire Palestinian people, [but] they do not accept the warning, nor do they accept the advice!”
Al Jazeera, the Qatari state-owned news channel, has often been scrutinized by countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority.
It has been accused of espousing Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood ideology and rhetoric.