Mahmoud Al-Zahar

A senior leader of the fighter group Hamas said the Palestinian movement was not seeking a new war with Israel and insisted a network of tunnels it is digging, some of which have reached into Israel in the past, was “defensive.”

Speaking to members of the Foreign Press Association in Gaza, Mahmoud Al-Zahar suggested the prospects of reconciliation with the rival Fatah party of President Mahmoud Abbas were slim, despite years of international efforts to forge unity.

“I think nobody here in the region is looking for a war,” said Zahar, 71, who has survived two Israeli assassination attempts, one of which, in 2003, killed his son.

“We are not looking for any confrontation with Israel, but if they are going to launch an aggression we have to defend ourselves,” he told reporters late on Wednesday.

Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007 after a brief civil war with Abbas’s forces. It maintains strict security over the coastal territory, where more than 1.9 million people live. Zahar is one of Hamas’s founders and one of its most senior figures in Gaza, regarded as close to the military wing.

Asked why Hamas was building tunnels, Zahar said they were defensive and suggested they were nothing against the might of the US-supplied Israeli military.

“You are speaking about tunnels? You are not speaking about F-35 (fighter planes)? You are not speaking about the nuclear bomb in Israel… The tunnels are a matter of self-defense,” he said.

Hamas’s armed wing has lost 10 fighters this year in tunnel collapses. In strongly worded speeches, the group’s leaders have pledged to pursue the tunnel building.

The heightened tension on both sides has fueled fears of another war, which would be the fifth since Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006. The last war, in July-August 2014, left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead, most of them civilians, while 73 Israelis, nearly all soldiers, were killed.

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