While US President Donald J. Trump and his administration are working hard to bring peace to the Middle East and disarm terror groups in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, the Iranian regime and its proxies are doing their utmost to ensure that their Jihad (holy war) to destroy Israel continues in full force.
The Iranian regime is evidently (and understandably) afraid of losing its terror proxies – Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen. These terror groups, whose primary goal is to eliminate Israel, have suffered severe blows over the past two years as a result of Israeli military operations targeting their leaders and military infrastructure.
Although Iran's terror proxies have been weakened, they are trying to rise from the ashes with the help of their patrons in Tehran.
As part of their effort to foil Trump's Gaza peace plan and attempts to persuade more Arab and Islamic countries to join the Abraham Accords with Israel, representatives of the Iran-backed terror groups attended a conference in Beirut in the first week of November organized by a group called the Arab National Conference.
According to Ziad Hafez, the group's former general secretary:
"The Arab National Conference (ANC) is the prime popular Arab nationalist institution in the Arab world. Over the last three decades it has managed to reframe the Arab nationalist narrative and redefine the concept of Arab nationalism. The positions and statements of the ANC are key to the resurgence of Arab nationalism and to the understanding of events currently taking place in the Arab homeland."
The conference was attended by more than 250 "Arab political, cultural, and resistance figures" from several Arab and Islamic countries. Key speakers included leaders of Hamas, PIJ, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, who declared that the "resistance [terrorism] remains the central path to confronting Israel and expansionist agendas across Palestine and the Middle East."
Ma'an Bashour, a prominent Lebanese political figure, said that "resistance" is not merely military but "a political, cultural, and social framework essential for restoring sovereignty."
ANC Secretary-General Hamdeen Sabahi emphasized the need to counter narratives of Arab defeat. "The nation has won, and the day of Palestine's liberation is near," he said.
Sabahi rejected calls by the Trump administration and the Lebanese government to disarm the Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. These weapons, he added, "represent the dignity of the [Arab] nation."
According to Sabahi, one of the outcomes of Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel is the victory in New York City's mayoral election of Zohran Mamdani, "who declared his allegiance to Palestine."
The October 7 atrocities, Sabahi said, also showed that the process of normalization between Arab countries and Israel was "condemned to death on the [Arab and Islamic] popular level."
Senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya said in a speech before the conference that the October 7 massacres were "a response to attempts to obliterate the Palestinian cause and build a new Middle East."
Al-Hayya added:
"October 7 registered an epic of heroism inside Palestine and on its borders when the nation participated, each according to its ability, in supporting us. The Al-Aqsa Flood [the name Hamas uses to describe the October 7 atrocities] has placed before us a great duty to develop plans and accumulate capabilities to move towards the liberation of Palestine [a euphemism for the destruction of Israel]."
This statement contradicts recent remarks by White House Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who said that Hamas officials told him and Jared Kushner that the terror group will disarm. In a speech before the America Business Forum in Miami on November 6, Witkoff said:
"Hamas has always indicated that they would disarm. They've said so – they said it to us directly during that famous meeting that Jared had with them. I hope they keep their word..."
If Hamas had any real intention of laying down its weapons, its leaders would not be participating in a conference that has come out in public against disarming terror groups in the Middle East. If Hamas were serious about implementing the Trump plan, it would not be participating in a conference that rejects it.
Ziyad al-Nakhalah, secretary-general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second-largest terror group in the Gaza Strip, and whose members participated in the October 7 attack on Israel, also expressed opposition to any plan to disarm terror groups.
"We are still in the field and we emphasize the need to protect the resistance," al-Nakhalah told the ANC conference. He claimed that the Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip "fought against an international coalition led by the US" over the past two years.
"We emerged from this battle with our weapons in our hands," the PIJ leader said. Referring to the possibility that the terror groups would comply with Trump's plan and lay down their weapons, he said: "Trump's plan has set many obstacles and conditions that cannot be implemented."
Jamil Mazhar, deputy secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Palestinian terror group that pioneered aircraft-hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, told the conference that the fight against the "Zionist enemy" will continue. "We are meeting to renew our pledge against the Zionist enemy and those who are allied with it, and the fighting continues," Mazhar stressed.
Ammar al-Moussawi, Hezbollah's international relations official, also rejected attempts to disarm his organization. "The resistance option in Lebanon was, and still is, a strategic decision stemming from the belief in the justice of the Palestinian cause," al-Moussawi said.
The Hezbollah official claimed that "attempts to restrict the resistance's weapons in Lebanon come in response to Arab and Western pressures." Al-Moussawi said that Hezbollah, "which has sacrificed thousands of martyrs, is capable of producing a new generation that will continue the path of resistance."
The leader of Yemen's Houthi militia, Abdel-Malik al-Houthi, warned against attempts by Israel and the US "to disarm the resistance in Lebanon and Gaza." He urged the Arab nations to "preserve and strengthen all elements of power to defeat Israel."
The ANC conference in Beirut featuring the Iran-backed "axis of resistance" is a direct challenge not only to the Trump administration but also to the Lebanese government, which has failed to carry out its decision from August 2024 to disarm Hezbollah.
The statements of the leaders of the terror groups at the conference show that they, together with Iran's regime, are determined to continue their Jihad to obliterate Israel and resist attempts to confiscate their weapons.
The war in the Gaza Strip may be over, but the Islamist terrorists' desire to destroy Israel remains as strong as ever.
Khaled Abu Toameh is an award-winning journalist based in Jerusalem.
