Hamas leaders visit Egypt’s Al-Azhar to discuss J’lem

By Mohammed Majid

CAIRO (AA) – A Hamas delegation led by group leader Ismail Haniyeh held a meeting in Cairo with Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar.

“The meeting addressed the dangers facing the Palestinian cause, Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, along with ongoing [Israeli] attempts to Judaize the holy city,” Hamas said in a statement released Thursday evening.

According to the statement, the Thursday meeting also tackled the dire humanitarian situation in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip as a result of Israel’s 12-year blockade of the coastal enclave.

In the statement, Hamas urged Muslim nations to “focus their efforts on safeguarding Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque and supporting the steadfastness of the city’s Palestinian residents”.

In its own statement issued after the meeting, the Al-Azhar, Egypt’s highest Sunni-Muslim religious authority, quoted al-Tayeb as saying that the Palestinian cause remained “the primary issue facing the Muslim nation”.

On Sunday, leading members of Palestinian resistance factions -- including Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- arrived in Cairo for talks with Egyptian officials.

The visit came two days after an Egyptian intelligence delegation visited Gaza for talks with Hamas in which the two sides discussed a proposed Hamas-Israel truce and the stalled Hamas-Fatah reconciliation process.

Recent months have seen Egyptian officials engage in intense shuttle diplomacy between the Gaza Strip, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Israel, where they have held talks with Hamas, the Palestinian government and Israeli officials respectively.