GAZA, (PIC)-- The Hamas Movement said on Wednesday that the victory it has achieved in Al-Khalil polytechnic University's students election was a strong sign of the Movement's rising popularity in the West Bank despite IOF-PA aggression.

The United Islamic Bloc, a union of the  academic wings of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad at the University, won the student elections despite attempts of Fatah's Shabiba to spoil the victory.

"This is clear evidence to all that Hamas was strong enough, and that all the attempts made to marginalize it in the Palestinian arena, particularly in the West Bank had totally failed", the Movement asserted.

Fawzi Barhoum, the spokesman of Hamas in Gaza Strip, underlined that Hamas and its political program couldn’t be erased from the hearts of the Palestinian people [as detractors of Hamas think].

Barhoum also noted that results of the elections in the University proved beyond reasonable doubt that Hamas's cadres and supporters in the West Bank remained faithful to their mother faction, and that all the attempts to displace it would fail.

"Those people (PA chief Mahmoud Abbas and his security forces in the West Bank) will certainly fail in doing what the Israeli occupation forces had failed to do against the Movement", underscored Barhoum, asserting that the victory of Hamas in the election was "big blow" to Abbas's "futile" negotiations with the Israelis.

Hamas Movement had been exposed to vicious arrest campaigns at the hands of the IOF  and the PA security forces where hundreds of its supporters were arrested and thrown into Israeli and PA jails.