THE Leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement says the latest Israeli attack on the besieged Gaza Strip is an act of clear aggression and crime.
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made the remarks in a nocturnal speech on the occasion of the lunar month of Muharram, while addressing the ongoing Israeli onslaught on the coastal enclave.
Nasrallah said what is going on in Gaza is a clear aggression and crime by Israel, because Gazans had done nothing to justify such an attack.
‘Any honourable person will condemn this attack … but many Arab countries and regimes remain silent … It is the right of the resistance and the Palestinian people to respond to Israeli attack in any way and at any time and place they choose … Silence in the face of this act of terror will pave the way for more acts of terror.’
Nasrallah said the resistance in Lebanon and Palestine has proven that the Israeli army can be defeated and humiliated.
He added, ‘The enemy’s calculations are always wrong. They threaten Palestine, while their main goal is Lebanon.
‘We are closely following what is going on in Gaza … They are mistaken if they think we are afraid of Israel …
‘The Lebanese resistance will not remain silent … the resistance is stronger than ever before … the response given to Israeli aggression by the Islamic Jihad shows that the resistance will not remain silent in the face of the enemy aggression.’
Elsewhere in his remarks, Nasrallah said some regional regimes want ‘to convince us that Israel is the pigeon of peace, but this regime has been founded on the basis of massacre and crime.
‘Some people are trying to distort the reality, while Israel is founded through committing crimes.’
He added that the Zionist enemy actually wages a psychological war through its military campaigns and their subsequent devastation.
‘However, the resistance in Lebanon and Palestine has proven that the occupying army can be both defeated and humiliated and its apparent power can be shattered,’ the Hezbollah leader said.
The new Israeli aggression against Gaza has drawn widespread condemnation
Nasrallah noted that the resistance front must try to bolster its own strengths while discovering and highlighting the enemy’s weaknesses.
He said the United States thinks it is all-powerful and mighty, but it has suffered drastic defeats in past decades.
‘It was expelled from Vietnam with humiliation. It has been also defeated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Somalia, Venezuela and Cuba.
‘It has been trying in vain to topple the Venezuelan government for years. Experience has shown that the United States can be defeated both in politics and on the field and these facts must be elucidated,’ Nasrallah said.
Islamic Jihad has fired over 100 rockets in retaliation for the Israeli massacre.
Tensions have skyrocketed across the coastal sliver and the occupied territories since Friday, when the Israeli regime carried out a massacre against the Gaza Strip, killing as many as 24 people, including a senior commander of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad resistance movement and six children.
The Palestinian Health Ministry says scores of others have been injured in the latest Israeli strikes.
The Islamic Jihad retaliated soon afterwards by firing hundreds of rockets towards the occupied territories. It called the reprisal only an ‘initial response’ to the Israeli bloodbath.
- The latest bout of airstrikes by the Israeli regime in the north and the south of the besieged Gaza Strip has claimed the lives of six Palestinian children, and the second senior commander of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad resistance movement.
Islamic Jihad on Sunday confirmed that Khaled Mansour, its commander in the south of the Gaza Strip, had been killed in an Israeli raid on Saturday, Al Jazeera reported citing a statement by the movement.
Mansour is the second high-ranking member of Islamic Jihad to be killed since Israel carried out airstrikes on Gaza on Friday, when it assassinated Tayseer al-Jabari, a senior commander of the Islamic Jihad movement in the north.
Moreover, several children have been killed in the Gaza Strip as Israeli jets bombed the besieged enclave for a second day.
At least four children were killed in a blast in a residential area near the Jabaliya refugee camp north of the Gaza Strip on Saturday bringing the tally of children killed since Friday to six. Among them are two brothers aged five and 11 in the Jabaliya refugee camp.
Medical sources in Gaza identified the two brothers killed in the Israeli assault as Moamen Al-Nayrab and Ahmed Al-Nayrab, with the Palestinian Health Ministry saying the regime’s brutal raid had since Friday left at least 32 people dead and 215 wounded.
‘I can’t even put to words what I have just witnessed, I’m still shaking,’ Ahamd Arafah, an eyewitness, said as he recounted the horrific scenes in an interview with the Middle East Eye.
‘We were watching the news like everyone, then we heard screaming and went outside.
‘I saw frightening scenes. Blood-covered children, body parts all over the street, people running around confused.
‘It was literally a massacre. There are no other words to describe it. I’m still in shock at what I saw. They were just children. What is their crime?’
Tensions have soared across the coastal enclave and the occupied territories since Friday, when the Israeli regime carried out a massacre against the Gaza Strip, killing scores of people and hitting a series of what it said were military targets.
Palestinian authorities said that 650 housing units have been damaged in the first 24 hours of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, which has targeted several residential towers.
Israel stopped the planned transport of fuel into Gaza before it struck on Friday, crippling the territory’s lone power plant and reducing electricity to around eight hours per day and drawing warnings from health officials that hospitals would be severely impacted within days.
In response to the brutal Israeli airstrikes Palestinian resistance forces fired more than 400 rockets at Israel, setting off air raid sirens and sending settlers running to bomb shelters.
The Islamic Jihad called the retaliatory barrage only an ‘initial response’ to the Israeli bloodbath, with the Palestinian resistance movement’s Secretary General Ziad al-Nakhalah saying the Israeli enemy must expect a ‘non-stop’ confrontation in the wake of the aggression.
Egypt is said to be engaged in intensive talks to calm the situation.
An Egyptian intelligence delegation headed by Major General Ahmed Abdelkhaliq arrived in Israel on Saturday and would be travelling to Gaza for mediation talks, hoping to secure a day’s ceasefire in order to carry out the talks, the report citing unnamed Egyptian security sources added.
Israel said on Saturday it is preparing for its aerial operation in Gaza to last a week, saying there are currently no discussions on a ceasefire with Islamic Jihad. The military ‘is preparing for the operation to last week’ and is ‘not currently holding ceasefire negotiations’, it said.
Last May, Gaza’s resistance groups fired around 4,000 rockets during the 11-day Operation Sword of al-Quds after the Israeli regime initiated the war, which marked the fourth wholesale military campaign by the occupying regime against the densely-populated Palestinian enclave.
