Senior Palestinian Authority official Mahmoud Al-Habbash claimed that the humanitarian port built by the US in Gaza was a secret plot to expel Gazans and annex Gaza, according to a Palestinian Media Watch report on Monday.
Habbash is chairman of the Supreme Council for Sharia Justice for the PA and Supreme Sharia Judge. He also serves as PA Chief Mahmoud Abbas's religious and Islamic affairs adviser.
Habbash said, "The floating port is an attempt to throw dust in [our] eyes. It is an attempt to keep the situation in the Gaza Strip under Israeli rule and Israeli sovereignty."
"What we fear is that this floating port will constitute a prelude to carrying out the Israeli plot that strives to expel the Gaza Strip residents through different ports."
Other commentators joined in, with Kamal Zakarneh calling the port's ostensible purpose of delivering aid "a prelude for something much more dangerous."
He claimed that there was "a joint Israeli-American policy of taking control, to perpetuate the control over the Gaza Strip and the control over the lives of the Gaza Strip residents."
"There is great concern that they will force the residents through economic, security, and social pressure to leave and empty the Gaza Strip of the residents and annex it to the 1948 territories," he told PA state TV.
Conspiracies in the Palestinian Authority
Conspiracies about the true intentions of Israel and the United States are common among the top political cadres of the PA.
PA President Abbas received his doctorate in the Soviet Union for his 1982 thesis titled The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-1945.
In it, he questioned not only the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust but also whether the gas chambers even existed.