Palestinian protesters hold a portrait of Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, captioned with the word 'traitor', on 14 August 2020 at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem al-Quds. (Photo by AFP)

Ramallah, July 15 (RHC)-- Several Palestinian resistance factions have condemned the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for opening an embassy in Tel Aviv, only weeks after Israel massacred over 120 Palestinians in the long-besieged Gaza Strip.

Wednesday’s opening of the Emirati embassy, which is situated in the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, came two weeks after the inauguration of Israel’s mission in Abu Dhabi.

The UAE, along with Bahrain, signed normalization pacts with the Israeli regime during an official ceremony hosted by former US president Donald Trump at the White House in September 2020. Palestinians slammed the deals as a treacherous "stab in the back" of their cause against the Israeli occupation.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the Gaza-based Hamas resistance movement said the UAE’s move signaled its continued insistence on the “great sin” it committed against Palestinians and all the people of the region who fully reject all forms of normalization with Israel.

“What is even more dangerous is the fact that this behavior of the UAE comes right after the terrorist Zionist aggression on our people and its sacred sites, in which it committed massacres against defenseless civilians and destroyed their houses” as the whole world watched, it added.

“This represents a dangerous downturn in the UAE’s political perspective, which would not only provide an official cover for the crimes committed by the Zionist enemy against the Palestinian people but would also encourage it to commit even more crimes and to move forward with its extremist racist Judaization projects.”

Hamas said the UAE and other Arab countries that normalized their relations with Israel will soon “discover the size and gravity of their crime,” urging them to “correct this wrong path and end all dealings and normalization with Israel.”

“We stress the need to stop this dangerous deterioration in the Emirati policies and to spare no effort in setting the course straight,” the movement added.

Additionally, Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said that the opening of the UAE embassy in Tel Aviv will undoubtedly deal a blow to the Palestine cause and serve the occupiers.  It represents “a stab in the back” of the Palestinian nation and their resistance, which was manifested in the Operation al-Quds Sword, he added, referring to the operation launched in May by resistance groups in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for the Zionist regime’s acts of aggression against Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Meanwhile, Tarek Silmi, a spokesman for the Islamic Jihad, another Gaza-headquartered resistance group, said the Emirati rulers rushed to open their embassy in Tel Aviv at a time when “the crimes of the occupation in al-Quds, the demolition of houses, and the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque were aggravating.”

“Perhaps this embassy is built on the ruins of a house or land of a Palestinian family that was displaced or wiped out during the 1948 Nakba,” he said.  “Alliance with the enemy will stand as treason and crime, no matter how much the trumpets of falsehood try to justify normalization and the normalizers try to hide the truth.”

For its part, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) described the Arabs who make peace with Israel as traitors, saying the inauguration of the UAE embassy in the occupied territories means moving from “normalization to Zionization.”

“Some Arab regimes are continuing to strengthen their relations with the occupation at the expense of the blood of the Palestinian people,” it said. “The UAE has agreed to become a pawn in the hands of the Zionist-American system and its agents in the region.”

The PFLP added that Arab rulers are signing peace agreements with Israel in a bid to preserve their own rule.   “They are looking for someone to protect them and protect their thrones. They are delusional in this, as they go against the will of the people, the land and the history,” it said.