Hamas leader says Gaza revolt like Warsaw uprising

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israel's fight with the Palestinians has reduced Gaza to the world's largest open-air prison and residents have no choice but to revolt, just as the Jews in Warsaw fought the Nazis in World War Two, a Hamas leader wrote in a U.S. newspaper article on Thursday.

Mahmoud al-Zahar, a founder of the Islamist militant group, wrote the opinion piece for The Washington Post before meeting former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, in Cairo on Thursday.

"Resistance remains our only option," Zahar wrote. "Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world's largest open-air prison, can do no less."

Israel and the United States brand Hamas a terrorist group. Carter counters that the exclusion of Hamas from peace negotiations is counterproductive and says he wants to hear the group's vision.

Israeli officials shunned Carter this week because of his contacts with Hamas. Zahar met Carter in Cairo after Israeli authorities refused to let Carter into Gaza from Israel.

Zahar wrote that Carter's views were a "welcome tonic" and that no "'peace plan,' 'road map' or 'legacy' can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions."

PRECONDITIONS

He then rattled off a string of preconditions.

"A 'peace process' with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently," Zahar wrote.

"That would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees," he added. "Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again."

Zahar, whose son was killed in an Israeli air strike three months ago, said Palestinians were locked in a total war "waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal -- from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that 'legalizes' the infrastructure of apartheid."

In an editorial, the Post said it believed Zahar's words were worth publishing "because they provide some clarity about the group he helps to lead."

It criticized Zahar for trying to justify a recent Hamas ambush on Israeli civilians, saying "no act of terrorism is out of bounds for the Hamas leader." The editorial also took aim at Carter.

"It is one thing to communicate pragmatically, and quite another to publicly and unconditionally grant recognition and political sanction to a leader or a group that advocates terrorism, mass murder or the extinction of another state," the Post said. "That is what Mr. Carter is doing."

Carter earlier met a West Bank leader from Hamas and is expected to meet overall leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus.

(Writing by David Alexander, Editing by Howard Goller)