Hamas’ Spokesperson Denies Statements Attributed to Movement’s Leaders on Iran’s Qom
The Claim
Ismail Haniyeh stated that Hamas has true loyalty to Qom, Iran’s religious city.
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Emerging story
Accounts and pages on Twitter have circulated an update of two statements regarding Iran’s Qom City. The tweets attributed the first statement to Hamas’s Head of Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh. The tweet read that the movement’s true loyalty lies with Qom. The leadership is seeking to establish Husainiyat to commemorate the passing of Iran’s IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in early January 2020 in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq.
The second tweet is attributed to a Hamas senior leader named Osama Hamdan. The claim said that the statement was made during Hamdan’s participation in the 35th Conference on Islamic Unity in Tehran, in which he said that Mecca’s Black Stone should be moved to Qom.
The two photos are screenshots of the alleged statements made in tweets, along with photos of the two leaders.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar investigated the claims circulated on Twitter and found that they were fake. Following up with Hamas’s spokesperson Hazem Qasem, Misbar was informed that two alleged statements are fake and could not be further from the truth.
The claim was made to coincide with the beginning of the 35th International Islamic Unity Conference, held on Oct. 19 in Iran’s capital city, Tehran.
Both Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) participated in the event organized by the World Forum for Proximity of Islamic Schools of Thought on Prophet Mohammad’s birth anniversary. The event was attended by several religious scholars, intellectuals, and personalities from several countries, including Haniyeh and Hamdan.
The Palestinian Information Center was reporting on a Hamas delegation arriving in Tehran to participate in the Conference.
The city of Qom, located south of Tehran and the religious capital of Iran, is home to dozens of religious seminaries and venerated religious personalities.
