GAZA CITY (AFP) — Tens of thousands of Hamas supporters massed in Gaza City on Sunday to mark the 21st anniversary of the creation of the Islamist movement which seized control of the Gaza Strip last year.
In an address to the crowds, Ismail Haniya, the head of the Hamas administration in Gaza, boasted that US President George W. Bush's administration had failed to defeat his movement, which had only grown stronger.
"Bush declared war on the Palestinian people... He provided money and arms to the seditionists to wage a war against legality," Haniya said, referring to the deadly streetfighting with loyalists of Western-backed president Mahmud Abbas that preceded Hamas's takeover of Gaza.
"Bush failed, we have not been overthrown," he said. And despite Israel's blockade of the territory, "Hamas is stronger and will remain stronger because it draws its strength from God."
Busloads of demonstrators flooded into Gaza City from across the densely populated coastal strip to hear Haniya's speech, waving the green flags of the Islamic Resistance Movement.
The rally, which Hamas television said drew hundreds of thousands of people, was intended as a show of strength in the Islamists' standoff with Abbas's West Bank-based administration.
Another top official in Gaza, Mahmud Zahar, boasted on the Hamas website that the group had grown "from a support base of a few thousand people to a backing of millions in Arab countries and around the world".
"It has succeeded in striking at Israel's national security," he said.
Hamas won an upset victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections in January 2006 but remains blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by both the European Union and the United States.
Israel has imposed a crippling blockade on Gaza ever since the Islamists seized control of the territory.
Hamas and Israel signed up to an Egyptian-brokered truce in June but it runs out on Thursday after weeks of persistent violence.
The Islamists accuse Israel of failing to honour its side of the bargain by easing the blockade. Israel charges that Hamas has failed to stop militant groups from raining rockets and mortar rounds on its southern towns.
"There is no sense in extending the truce while the enemy is not respecting it and is keeping Gaza in a state of siege," said Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum, without saying whether the Islamists intended to declare it over.
Senior Israeli defence ministry official Amos Gilad, who led the Israeli side in the Egyptian-brokered negotiations for the original truce, was in Cairo on Sunday for talks on extending it.
Despite a spate of tit-for-tat attacks since November 4 that has prompted some Israeli ministers to call for a major ground offensive against Gaza, Gilad has repeatedly spoken out in favour of extending the truce, arguing that there is no military solution.
"Experience shows that military operations don't always solve problems in the Middle East," he said late last month. "You have to find the optimal solution. To date no appropriate military solution has been found for the Strip."
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