Hamas criticizes US House of Representatives resolution calling Israel "non-racist".

Hamas has condemned a resolution passed by the US House of Representatives that refused to label Israel a "racist or apartheid" regime. Gaza - Hamas has condemned a resolution passed by the US House of Representatives that refused to label Israel a "racist or apartheid" regime. In Tuesday's vote, up to 412 US lawmakers approved the resolution, for which there were only nine "no" votes. The law came in response to comments made last Saturday by Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Committee, calling Israel a "racist state".

The Gaza Strip-based Palestinian resistance movement condemned the resolution in a statement by the Palestinian Information Center news agency on Wednesday. "This US resolution has ignored the black history of the Zionist occupation, marked by dozens of massacres," the group said. The resolution also turned a blind eye to crimes recently committed by gangs of illegal Israeli settlers who, under the protection of the Israeli military, subjected the northern occupied West Bank town of Huwara and dozens of Palestinian villages to "arson attacks and the organized destruction of homes, vehicles and farms," the statement said. The crimes are an example of "the racist practices and ethnic cleansing policies pursued by the occupation against the Palestinian people," Hamas noted.

The statement also cited many instances of "fascist statements" made by Israeli officials, including Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Earlier, the Israeli official said the Palestinians must either "live in the occupied territories as second-class citizens, or be exiled or killed." "Such a US resolution will not change the reality of the criminal and racist Zionist occupation regime, which relies on ethnic cleansing, expelling the legitimate landowners and replacing them with invaders," it said. Israel has practiced an apartheid regime - a system of extreme racial segregation - against Palestinians since 1948. That year, the regime claimed its existence across Palestine after a Western-backed war in which tens of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly evicted from their homes, villages were depopulated and thousands killed.

Israel launched another war of this nature in 1967, occupying the West Bank, including East al-Quds, which the Palestinians claim as the capital of their future state. Since apartheid, the Israeli authorities have created a judicial system that allows them to steal land and property from Palestinians and expropriate them to make room for illegal settlers. Almost daily, Israeli military bulldozers roll into the occupied territories, driving Palestinians out of their homes, demolishing their belongings in front of their eyes and even making the uprooted people pay for their property to be demolished.