Bardawil calls for uprising with aim of freeing prisoners

[ 08/10/2011 - 11:20 AM ]

KHAN YOUNIS, (PIC)-- Senior Hamas official Salah al-Bardawil has called for a popular uprising with the aim of freeing the Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli prisons. “The time has come for the Palestinian people to rise up to free the captives. The [Israeli occupier] will not be able to stand against such an uprising and will succumb to the conditions set by the resistance,” Bardawil said during rallies organized by Hamas in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis on Friday evening. Bardawil emphasized that the resistance forces would not give in to Israel’s demands in a prisoner swap with Hamas and refused any deal outside of the conditions according to the resistance forces. Bardawil warned that the Israeli occupation authorities were at pains to break the will of the prisoner and resistance movements as well as the Palestinian people by imposing tight restrictions on prisoners inside the Israeli prisons. Bardawil also reiterated Hamas’s commitment to upholding Palestinian rights, saying that “when the Palestinian negotiator (i.e. PA president Mahmoud Abbas) went to New York amid applause and cries, we said ‘no’, for fear that we would be bargaining the rest of our rights for the sake of a failed state and failed international relations that would take our people into a dark tunnel for the next twenty years.” “How can we agree when we see compromise on the Palestinian people, land, and holy sites,” Bardawil added. Thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli occupation prisons have joined a hunger strike over the past couple of weeks to protest inhumane conditions inside the prisons.