THE Gaza-based Hamas and Islamic Jihad resistance movements have slammed the fatal Israeli shooting of two Palestinian men at a military checkpoint south of Nablus, vowing that the resistance of the Palestinian nation will continue until the Israeli regime is defeated and an independent Palestinian state is created.
Hamas last Friday called on all Palestinian security services and resistance fighters to follow the path of the fallen victims, identified as 47-year-old Imad Abu Rasheed and Ramzi Sami Zabara, 35, in defence of Palestinian people and to aim their rifles at Israeli troops, who keep killing Palestinians in cold blood and do not shy away from desecrating sacred places and shrines.
The movement added that the northern West Bank city of Nablus, the Askar refugee camp on the eastern outskirts of Nablus, and elsewhere across the West Bank serve as fields of confrontation with Israeli soldiers.
The Palestinian people are undertaking a campaign of resistance that will never subside unless the occupying regime is defeated and an independent Palestinian state with East al-Quds as its capital is established, Hamas said.
Israeli forces have killed two Palestinians in the West Bank in a further escalation of their aggression in the occupied territories.
The Islamic Jihad movement also said that Palestinian people will unleash their fury against the occupying Tel Aviv regime and will keep up resistance against Israeli soldiers and settlers.
It pointed out that Israel is going to great lengths in order to maintain its so-called security apparatus, which is going down in the face of valiant resistance fighters carrying out operations across the West Bank.
The Palestinian Health Ministry announced just before 2am local time last Friday (23:00 GMT Thursday 10th November) that Abu Rasheed was killed due to bullets that hit his stomach, chest and head.
Palestinian officials later reported that Zabara succumbed to his wounds from a bullet to the heart last Friday morning.
Another man, whose identity was not immediately known, was also wounded. He was reported to be in a stable condition after undergoing surgery at Rafidia Surgical Hospital in Nablus.
Both Zabara and Abu Rasheed worked for the Palestinian Authority’s Civil Defence and lived in the Askar refugee camp.
Israeli forces have also recently been conducting overnight raids and killings in the northern occupied West Bank, mainly in the cities of Jenin and Nablus, where new groups of Palestinian resistance fighters have been formed.
Israel has killed at least 183 Palestinians since the start of 2022 in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, including 26 since the start of October, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said in a new report yesterday.
Local and international rights groups have condemned Israel’s excessive use of force and ‘shoot-to-kill policy’ against Palestinians.
- Lebanese President Michel Aoun has ruled out peace with the ‘Israeli enemy’, a day after the sides signed a deal that demarcates their maritime border in the Mediterranean Sea.
Aoun held a meeting with journalists last Friday to say farewell as he is set to leave Baabda Palace on Sunday, at the end of his term.
‘The idea of peace with the Israeli enemy is out of the question,’ he said, noting that the talks with the Israeli regime were indirect and that the deal was brokered by US mediation.
He also said that the regime ‘cannot withdraw’ from the maritime deal.
Lebanon and Israel separately signed the US-brokered deal last Thursday 10th November. The final paperwork was submitted to the United Nations in Naqura, South Lebanon, concluding a long path of indirect negotiations of 12 years with the Israeli regime.
Separately last Friday, the outgoing president told LBCI that Lebanon ‘demarcated the borders to avert war’, and that the agreement was ‘the outcome of national interests and stability’.
‘There are no papers, signatures, or anything else in the process of signing the demarcation agreement that could indicate a peace agreement was made,’ he said.
Hochstein says Israeli and US concessions in favour of Lebanon is because of their fear of war.
Israel and Lebanon have technically been at war for decades. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 during the latter’s civil war and occupied Lebanese territory until 2000. Israel’s last military aggression against Lebanon was in the summer of 2006.
Last Thursday evening, the secretary general of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement called the deal a ‘very big victory for Lebanon and its people and resistance’.
‘Our mission is complete,’ Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said, emphasising that the deal ‘is not an international treaty and must not be viewed as recognition of Israel’.
‘Israel received no security guarantees,’ the Hezbollah chief asserted.
The remarks came as Amos Hochstein, the US mediator, admitted last Thursday that Washington and Tel Aviv made concessions to Lebanon out of fear of war.
‘War was a real threat and that if it happened, all oil and gas fields and international trade in the Mediterranean Sea and most importantly the flow of energy resources between the Persian Gulf and Europe would be disrupted,’ he said.
- The United States is preparing a new $275 million package of military aid for Ukraine as it continues to bolster Kiev’s forces amid Russia’s ongoing military operation, a report says.
The latest package is likely to include ammunition and more High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers.
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has said that the flow of weapons to Ukraine will continue as he claimed the added arms ‘have made such a difference on the battlefield’.
In the meantime, Russia has repeatedly warned that supplying Kiev with more and more weapons will only exacerbate the conflict, which is now in its ninth month.
Russia warns the United States against supplying advanced air defence systems to Ukraine, saying the move will only exacerbate the conflict, which is now in its eighth month.
Continuously flooding Ukraine with weapons ‘will only drag the conflict out and make it more painful for the Ukrainian side, but it will not change our goals and the end result’, the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said earlier this month.
Peskov insisted that the US was in reality engaged in the Ukraine conflict. ‘The US de facto has become deeply involved,’ he said.
His remarks echoed those of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who said that Washington had ‘been participating de facto in this war for a long time’.
‘This war is being controlled by the Anglo-Saxons,’ Lavrov said.
Meanwhile, Russia revealed last week that a large portion of the weapons provided to the Kiev regime by the US and its allies was headed to the black market and then into the hands of extremist and criminal groups in the Middle East, central Africa and Asia.
In this regard, the International Criminal Police Organisation, Interpol, has also sounded the alarm.
Interpol Secretary General Juergen Stock said that the flooding of arms from the United States and its European allies into the ex-Soviet country was a mistake.
He warned that a large share of the weapons sent by the West to Ukraine will eventually end up in criminal hands in Europe and beyond.
‘The high availability of weapons during the current conflict will result in the proliferation in illicit arms in the post-conflict phase,’ he insisted, urging countries to start scrutinising arms-tracking databases.
Interpol fears that such a huge flow of arms to Ukraine will only empower organised criminal gangs that have become increasingly involved in global operations, capable of exploiting the chaos created after the onset of the war in Ukraine.
France, Germany, and a number of other European countries, alongside the United States, have so far shipped tens of billions of dollars of weapons and ammunition with a declared aim of helping Kiev forces fight Russian troops.
‘This will come, I have no doubts … Criminals are already now, here as we speak, focusing on that,’ Stock said in Paris visiting from Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, southeast France.
