The Palestinians will continue their uprising against Israel until the creation of an independent state, a leading official in Yasser Arafat's Fateh movement said in an interview published Friday.
"The Intifada is only at its beginning. It is a popular movement of insurrection that will continue until the creation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital," Marwan Barghouti, the Fateh secretary general in the West Bank, told the Lebanese weekly Magazine.
"The objective that we are hoping to reach is the complete withdrawal of the Israeli occupier from all territory occupied in 1967, as stipulated by United Nations Security Council Resolution 242," he said.
The Palestinians have "blocked peripheral roads built for the Israeli settlements and created popular committees to protect our people against the settlers' aggressions."
"The movement is still at its birth and its intensity will increase in the coming weeks and months," he said.
Barghouti hailed the Lebanese Shiite fundamentalist movement Hezbollah, which spearheaded the guerrilla war leading to Israel's pullout from southern Lebanon in May after 22 years of occupation.
The Fateh official called on Hezbollah to include Palestinians on its list of prisoners detained by Israel whom the Lebanese group is seeking to exchange in return for four captured Israeli servicemen.
"Hizbollah’s heroic operations have had a fundamental role in boosting the morale of our people and incited us to double efforts in our struggle against the occupier," he said.
"In the name of families of Palestinian prisoners, I call on Hezbollah to add these prisoners to its list of detainees in case there are negotiations, because we have prisoners who have already been some 25 years in jail."
The senior Fateh official, who runs the armed Tanzim movement, is considered by Israel as a prime organizer of the latest violence in the West Bank.
Barghouthi, 40, is married to the daughter of charismatic Palestinian leader Khalil al-Wazir, also known as Abu Jihad, who founded Fateh alongside Salah Khaled, or Abu Iyad, and Yasser Arafat, now the Palestinian leader.
Wazir and Khaled were both assassinated in Tunisia.
Barghouti spent several years in Israeli prisons before being expelled from the Palestinian territories in 1987 when the first Intifada started.
Barghouti returned home in 1993 after the signing of the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians. He is a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council -- BEIRUT (AFP)
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