Hamas slams US House resolution calling Israel 'not racist, apartheid'

Hamas has decried a resolution approved by the US House of Representatives, which declined to refer to Israel as a "racist or apartheid" regime.

Voting on Tuesday, as many as 412 American legislators lent their blessing to the resolution, which faced only nine "no" votes. The legislation came in response to remarks made last Saturday by Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in which she called Israel a "racist state."

The Gaza Strip-based Palestinian resistance movement denounced the resolution in a statement carried by the Palestinian Information Center news agency on Wednesday.

"This US resolution has ignored the black history of the Zionist occupation, which is filled with dozens of massacres," the group said.

The resolution also turned a blind eye to the crimes that were recently committed by gangs of illegal Israeli settlers, who, under the protection provided by the Israeli military, exposed the town of Huwara in the north of the occupied West Bank as well as dozens of Palestinian villages to "arson attacks and organized destruction of homes, vehicles and farms," read the statement.

This is while the crimes exemplify "the racist practices and the ethnic cleansing policy that are pursued by the occupation against the Palestinian people," Hamas noted.

The statement also cited many instances of "fascist positions" voiced by Israeli officials, including Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich. Earlier, the Israeli official said Palestinians had to either live in the occupied territories "as second-class citizens or be banished or killed."

"Such a US resolution will not change the reality of the criminal and racist Zionist occupation entity, which relies on ethnic cleansing, displacing the rightful owners of the land and replacing them with intruders,” it added.

Israel has been practicing an apartheid regime -- a system of extreme racial segregation of people -- against Palestinians since 1948. That year, the regime claimed existence across Palestine after a Western-backed war, during which tens of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes, villages were depopulated, and thousands were killed.

MG