Former IUMS Leader Calls on Palestinians to Resist Trump’s Gaza Plan

For­mer Inter­na­tion­al Union of Mus­lim Schol­ars (IUMS) Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al Moham­mad Sal­im Al-Awa has called for stead­fast resis­tance to Trump’s Gaza plan, urg­ing Pales­tini­ans and Mus­lim nations to reject it as a threat to Pales­tin­ian rights and uni­ty. On 22 Novem­ber 2025, MEMRI report­ed that Al-Awa had called the Trump Gaza plan a dan­ger­ous scheme aimed at under­min­ing Pales­tin­ian resis­tance and self-deter­mi­na­tion. The arti­cle begins:

Lon­don-based Egypt­ian Islamist Moham­mad Sal­im Al-Awa, for­mer sec­re­tary-gen­er­al of the Inter­na­tion­al Union of Mus­lim Schol­ars (IUMS), called on Pales­tini­ans to reject Trump’s post-war plan for Gaza in a Novem­ber 16, 2025 appear­ance on Al-Jazeera Net­work (Qatar), one day before UN Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil Res­o­lu­tion 2803 was passed. He urged Arab and Mus­lim coun­tries sup­port­ing the plan to “just leave the Pales­tini­ans alone,” assert­ing that the war will resume and the resis­tance will strike again. Al-Awa con­demned any accep­tance of an inter­na­tion­al force in Gaza as for­bid­den, stat­ing that Pales­tini­ans, the resis­tance, Mus­lims, and Arabs must oppose the Amer­i­can plan. He empha­sized that after endur­ing a two-year geno­cide, the peo­ple of Gaza are capa­ble of impos­ing their will on the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty and reject disarmament.

Read more: https://www.memri.org/tv/mohammad-salim-al-awa-trump-gaza-plan-resistance

Key Points

• Moham­mad Sal­im Al-Awa described the Trump Gaza plan as a threat to Pales­tin­ian rights and self-determination.

• Al-Awa con­demned any accep­tance of an inter­na­tion­al force in Gaza as forbidden.

• Al-Awa urged Pales­tini­ans to reject the pro­pos­al and called on Arab and Mus­lim gov­ern­ments not to sup­port it.

• He called for Islam­ic schol­ars and orga­ni­za­tions to mobi­lize oppo­si­tion to the plan globally.

IUMS and Radical Palestine Fatwas: A Pattern of Religious Extremism

Moham­mad Sal­im Al-Awa is the for­mer Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al of the Inter­na­tion­al Union of Mus­lim Schol­ars (IUMS), a promi­nent orga­ni­za­tion of Islamist the­olo­gians some­times described as the supreme author­i­ty of the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (GMB). It was found­ed in 2004 by the late GMB leader Youssef Qaradawi with head­quar­ters in Qatar and Dublin. The orga­ni­za­tion claims to rep­re­sent approx­i­mate­ly 90,000 Mus­lim schol­ars world­wide, though its lead­er­ship has con­sis­tent­ly includ­ed promi­nent mem­bers of the GMB who main­tain the­o­log­i­cal and oper­a­tional con­nec­tions to transna­tion­al extrem­ist net­works, with Egypt, Sau­di Ara­bia, the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, and Bahrain des­ig­nat­ing the IUMS as a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion in 2017.

The IUMS has pub­lished state­ments pro­vid­ing reli­gious legit­imiza­tion for Hamas oper­a­tions, with past GIOR report­ing doc­u­ment­ing how the IUMS Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al of the Jerusalem Com­mit­tee Mraweh Nas­sar open­ly called for the anni­hi­la­tion of all Jews in Pales­tine, stat­ing that human­i­ty would only thrive once the Jew­ish nation was destroyed. The orga­ni­za­tion has pub­lished ser­mons and fat­was laud­ing jihad oper­a­tions by Pales­tin­ian fight­ers and urg­ing Mus­lims world­wide to sup­port vio­lence against Israel finan­cial­ly and phys­i­cal­ly, demon­strat­ing a con­sis­tent pat­tern of prais­ing extrem­ist move­ments from Hamas to the Tal­iban as legit­i­mate Islam­ic resistance.

The IUMS main­tains sig­nif­i­cant oper­a­tional pres­ence in Turkey, where Istan­bul-based con­fer­ences bring togeth­er IUMS lead­ers with Turk­ish gov­ern­ment offi­cials and Diyanet offi­cials to coor­di­nate mes­sag­ing on Gaza and Pales­tin­ian resis­tance, while Turkey’s gov­ern­ment pro­vides safe haven for IUMS oper­a­tions despite region­al pres­sure from Arab states that have des­ig­nat­ed the orga­ni­za­tion as terrorist.

Exter­nal references:

• Beyond Islam­ic Guid­ance: Qatar-based IUMS as an Agi­ta­tor in the Israel-Hamas War
• Arab Quar­tet Adds Inter­na­tion­al Union of Mus­lim Schol­ars & Sheikh Hasan Sul­tan to Ter­ror List
• The Inter­na­tion­al Union of Mus­lim Schol­ars issued a fat­wa call­ing for mil­i­tary Mus­lim sup­port for the Gaza Strip

Dis­claimer:

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) uti­lizes AI through­out the post­ing process, includ­ing the gen­er­a­tion of sum­maries for news items, intro­duc­tions, key points, and, often, the “con­text” sec­tion. We rec­om­mend ver­i­fy­ing all infor­ma­tion before use. Addi­tion­al­ly, all images are gen­er­at­ed using AI and are intend­ed sole­ly for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es. While they rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als dis­cussed, they should not be inter­pret­ed as real-world photography.