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WASHINGTON-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.
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As in the days of Noah....
