DAMASCUS CAIRO (PIC)– Former President Jimmy Carter met on Friday with Hamas political leader Khaled Mishaal in Damascus after meeting with the Syrian President Bashar al-Asad.
The meeting with Carter was also attended by the deputy head of the Hamas political bureau Dr. Mousa Abu Marzouk and senior member of the bureau Muhammad Nazzal.
Abu Marzouk told reporters after the meeting which was closed to the press that the talks concentrated on three topics the Israeli captive Gilad Shalit calming the situation in Gaza and lifting siege there.
On Thursday Carter also met with Mahmoud Zahhar and Sa’aeed Siyam in the Egyptian capital Cairo.
Dr. Mahmoud Al-Zahhar said that his meeting with former US president Jimmy Carter means an acceptance of Hamas as a legitimate national liberation Movement.
Hamas’s coordinator in Egypt Ibrahim Al-Darawi explained that Carter has a number of good initiatives that are needed by all concerned parties in the region.
Prior to meeting Zahhar and Siyam Carter conferred with Egyptian president Husni Mubarak to discuss peace initiatives in the region and to broker truce between the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli occupation forces although Darawi asserted the IOF troops dashed all hopes of truce by committing the ugly massacre east of Gaza city on Wednesday.
For his part Zahhar commended Carter’s determination to meet with Hamas leaders despite all the pressures on him to abandon such a meeting.
Carter started a nine-day tour in the Middle East saying he wanted to promote peace in the region and to push the peace process forward.
On Tuesday Carter asserted that he wasn’t visiting the region as a mediator adding that Hamas and Syria must be included in any peace process because “without Syria and Hamas peace couldn’t be achieved”. The White House announced that Carter was acting in his personal capacity.
Speaking at the American University in Cairo Carter condemned the economic blockade of Gaza describing it as an atrocity: “It’s an atrocity what is being perpetrated as punishment on the people in Gaza. It’s a crime … I think it is an abomination that this continues to go on.”
He also talked about the disproportionate retaliation by the Israelis to Palestinian resistance attacks: “If you live in Gaza you know that for every Israeli killed in any kind of combat between 30 to 40 Palestinians are killed because of the extreme military capability of Israel.”
