Gaza: Hamas detains Palestinian for removing poster of Soleimani

According to a relative of the detainee, the Palestinian militant group Hamas detained, on Thursday, a man for taking off a picture of assassinated Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani that was set by the group before the first anniversary of his death.

On Thursday, Al-Maghribi’s brother said on Facebook that Hamas detained Majdi al-Maghribi for removing a photo of a criminal.

In fact, Al-Maghribi had called Gazans in a Facebook post on Wednesday for tearing down banners of Soleimani in the city. Thereafter, he posted a video showing that he removes a photo of the murdered Iranian general.

Reuters related that after a military drill, Hamas put up on Tuesday a large picture of Soleimani on the main coastal road in Gaza.

According to Palestinian social media users, many other photos of Soleimani were showed across Gaza before the first anniversary of the Iranian general’s death. While Arabs criticized the banners and Israeli officials condemned them as praising a murderer.

Israeli military spokesman, Avichay Adraee, said on Twitter in Arabic, commenting on an image of one of the Soleimani poster in Gaza: A question to the people in Gaza: Do you expect Arabs to sympathize with you and your cause when they see you erecting statues of the killers of Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis and the Lebanese?.

According to a video shared by Palestinian social media users, the same poster currently looks to have been cut by Gazans, while a man filming the torn banner in Gaza was describing Soleimani as the killer of Syrians and Iraqis.

The posters comprised text from a speech by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh at Soleimani’s funeral in Tehran and the text contains: The martyr commander Qassem Soleimani who spent his life supporting the resistance…He is a martyr of al-Quds (Jerusalem). Many other Soleimani posters have also removed and ruined, and the Palestinians shared images and videos in social media.

It should be noted that ties between Shia Iran and Sunni Hamas briefly weakened in the early years of the Syrian conflict after that Hamas rejected to back Iran’s ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against Sunni protesters. Soleimani, who led the Quds Force, the overseas arms of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was assassinated in a US airstrike at Baghdad’s international airport on January 3.

Otherwise, a senior Hamas official related on Sunday that the group received $22 million in cash from Soleimani during a visit to Tehran in 2006, which created criticism from Iranians who accuse the regime of prioritizing its network of proxy groups over its citizens.

Iranian protesters have expressed their opposition to Tehran’s foreign policies and accused the regime of squandering the country’s resources on foreign militias in three separate waves of anti-government protests, in 2009, 2017, and 2019, using the popular chant, not Gaza, not Lebanon, I give my life for Iran in reference to Tehran’s backing for Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.