GAZA: Vowing to destroy Israel, Hamas paraded some 2,000 of its armed fighters and truck-mounted rockets through Gaza on Sunday, marking its 27th anniversary with its biggest show of force since the end of the Gaza war this summer.

A ceasefire in August halted 50 days of fighting with Israel in which local health officials said more than 2,100 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed. Israel put the number of its dead at 67 soldiers and six civilians.

At the parade, a senior Hamas leader reaffirmed the Islamist movement’s founding charter’s pledge to destroy Israel.

“This illusion called Israel will be removed. It will be removed at the hands of the Qassam Brigades,” said Khalil al-Hayya, a top Hamas leader, referring to the movement’s armed wing.

In recent years, some Hamas leaders have said they would accept a Palestinian state on

land Israel occupied in a 1967 war in return for a long-term truce but would continue to refuse to recognise its enemy’s right to exist.

Abu Ubaida, the brigades’ spokesman, said another confrontation with Israel might be inevitable unless tens of thousands of homes damaged or destroyed in the Gaza Strip in last summer’s conflict are rebuilt soon.

Published in Dawn December 15th , 2014