Barbella
Senator
GAZA CITY — With a climactic confrontation expected days from now at the fence separating the Gaza Strip from Israel, where Palestinians have been demonstrating for weeks, Yehya Sinwar, the leader in Gaza of Hamas, the militant group that rules the territory, offered little hope for a bloodless encounter.
“What’s the problem with hundreds of thousands of people parading through a fence that’s not a border?” he said Thursday. “What’s the problem with an influx like that?”
Mr. Sinwar offered lip service to nonviolence, saying he hoped that the presence of international journalists would constrain Israeli soldiers from massacring people who crossed the fence. But he demurred when asked if he would urge protesters to refrain from trying to cross the fence, as hundreds of others have tried with often fatal results. Since the demonstration began on March 30, 47 people have been killed and nearly 7,000 wounded.
A day earlier, however, speaking to hundreds of young Gazans, Mr. Sinwar was far less restrained in his language, saying, “We would rather die as martyrs than die out of oppression and humiliation,” and adding, “We are ready to die, and tens of thousands will die with us.”
The protests are expected to peak on Monday, when the United States formally moves its embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, and on Tuesday, the 70th anniversary of what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of them fled or were expelled from their homes in what became Israel.
In what was believed to be his first news conference as the leader of Hamas in Gaza, at least with foreign journalists, the press-shy Mr. Sinwar, who took over in February 2017, seemed to vacillate in tone between openness and moderation on the one hand, and vaguely menacing defiance on the other.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/world/middleeast/gaza-protests-yehya-sinwar.html
