THE head of Hamas resistance movement in the occupied West Bank says Palestinians have the right to resist the occupying Israeli regime, and are resolved to continue the path of resistance despite hardships.
‘The Palestinian people have no other option’ but to resist, Zaher Jabarin told al Jazeera on Tuesday.
He added that the Palestinian people have proven that they don’t care about Israeli threats, stressing that they won’t surrender, despite all the Israeli crimes.
The Hamas official reiterated the Palestinians’ right to resist the Israeli occupation by all means.
Referring to the incursions into the al-Aqsa mosque compound by extremist Israeli officials, Jabarin described the situation as ‘a religious war’.
He stressed that the major battle will be over al-Aqsa Mosque and al-Quds, noting that the Israeli plots against the holy site will fail.
‘Let Israel’s minister Itamar Ben-Gvir know that his fate will be like that of all the extremists who attacked our sanctities. Ben-Gvir’s fate will be like that of Ze’evi,’ he said, in an apparent reference to Rehavam Ze’evi, an Israeli minister who was killed in 2001.
On August 13, Ben-Gvir joined hundreds of settlers who intruded into the mosque compound in the occupied East al-Quds.
During his recent provocative visit, Ben-Gvir said that it was his ‘policy’ to allow Jewish prayers on the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Islam’s third-holiest site where only Muslims are allowed to pray under a status quo arrangement originally reached more than a century ago.
This week, Ben-Gvir also revealed his intention to build a Jewish synagogue inside the al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
He said that if he could, he would build a synagogue on the al-Asqa Mosque complex.
An Israeli minister’s proposal to build a synagogue inside al-Aqsa Mosque escalates tensions, warns the UN.
The UN condemns the latest remarks by far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir about the al-Aqsa Mosque compound as ‘highly counterproductive’.
Jabarin urged Muslim scholars across the world to perform their duty to defend al-Aqsa and Islamic holy sites.
The Hamas official also stressed the importance of unity among Palestinians to resist the occupation, amid the current difficult circumstances.
Regarding the talks aimed at reaching a ceasefire agreement in Gaza, Jabarin blamed Israel’s prime minister for the lack of an agreement, saying Benjamin Netanyahu wants to prolong the war in order to achieve his personal interests.
Netanyahu faces charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in three cases filed in 2019.
Jabarin’s remarks came as negotiations were underway in Egypt to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza.
Months of on-off talks have failed to yield an agreement to end Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged strip.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
The regime’s bloody onslaught on Gaza has so far killed at least 40,534 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 93,647 others. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under rubble.
Since the start of Israel’s aggression on the besieged Gaza Strip in October, the West Bank has also seen a rise in violence from Israeli forces and settlers that claimed the lives of hundreds of Palestinians.
- Pro-Palestinian students at American universities are facing restrictions over speaking out against Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip amid the regime’s ongoing brutal war.
US campuses adopted tough rules to restrict criticism of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza with the beginning of the first fall semester, after pro-Palestinian protests gained momentum throughout universities across the US in the last academic year.
This has caused widespread outrage on social media from students and supporters who perceive these recent moves as efforts to stifle the pro-Palestine student movement.
In a post on X, the National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) student group said that the Secure Community Network (SCN) has ‘held a roundtable with representatives from law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, to generate a list of ten security recommendations for universities to quell pro-Palestine protests in the fall’.
The New York University (NYU) People’s Solidarity Coalition also said in a post on its Instagram account, ‘It is clear universities across the city are communicating, just as TNS (The New School) and NYU coordinated their sweeps of our encampments in May.
‘They are losing control of the narrative and have decided to crack down on our online presence in an attempt to smother us, rather than meet our demands.’
The latest development comes two days after Instagram banned the account of Columbia University’s Students for Justice in Palestine, in yet another form of censorship by the US-based technology conglomerate Meta Platforms.
The blocking of the group’s account was the latest in a battle on Columbia’s campus, and on campuses across the US, over free speech and Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Columbia University’s president resigned after facing extensive criticism regarding her management of pro-Palestinian protests on campus.
The protesters who demanded an end to the US-backed war were met with brutal police violence.
- The Gaza Strip-based Palestinian resistance movement Hamas and the West Bank-headquartered Palestinian Authority have vehemently condemned the escalation of the Israeli regime’s deadly aggression across the occupied territory.
At least 11 Palestinians were killed on Wednesday after the regime began taking various areas throughout the territory, especially those lying in its northern parts, under intensified airstrikes and ground attacks.
The regime’s forces also engaged in a widespread campaign of arrests and systematic destruction of infrastructure across the targeted areas.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society said Israel carried out airstrikes against several towns across the occupied West Bank, killing at least 10 Palestinians.
Hamas called the escalation a ‘practical attempt by the terrorist occupation army to implement the plans of the extremist Zionist cabinet’, adding that the Israeli forces were acting on the ideas ‘expressed by its (the regime’s) fascist ministers’.
Notorious figures within the regime, including so-called security minister Itamar Ben Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, have called for the 1967-occupied territory’s annexation by Tel Aviv. The latter has even set out plans to prevent the territory’s inclusion as part of a Palestinian state.
Hamas, meanwhile, warned that the regime was seeking to expand its October-present genocidal war on Gaza, which has so far claimed the lives of at least 40,534 Palestinians, to the West Bank.
Israel’s ongoing strikes on the besieged Gaza Strip have claimed the lives of more civilians, including women and children.
Hamas considered the regime’s aggression against both the territories to be a product of ‘the suspicious international silence’ and ‘the absolute political and military support from the American administration and some Western capitals’.
The movement, however, expressed certainty that the regime’s campaign in the West Bank ‘will undoubtedly be broken by the steadfastness of our people’.
Concluding its statement, it called on the Palestinians there to engage in a general mobilisation and escalate all forms of resistance.
Also on Wednesday, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for the Palestinian Authority’s presidency, denounced the Israeli aggression, saying it continued a ‘comprehensive war’ on the Palestinian people, their land, and their holy sites.
The policy would lead to ‘dire and dangerous’ results, he warned, adding, however, that the escalation would not reward the regime with security and stability.
The world must take ‘immediate and urgent action’ to curb this extremist regime that ‘poses a threat to the stability of the region and the world as a whole’, he said.
- Amid the Israeli genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, which has claimed more than 40,500 lives so far, including over 16,500 children, survivors are making their presence felt through creative mediums.
A series of drawings by children in the besieged Palestinian territory who have so far survived the bombings point to the scale and magnitude of the tragedy that has befallen Palestinians.
Shared by the Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, the drawings were made by Palestinian girls who are receiving mental health counselling at a clinic in al-Mawasi.
Al-Mawasi is a coastal town in the southern Gaza Strip, west of Khan Younis city. Despite being designated as a so-called ‘safe zone’ by the Israeli regime, the town has been relentlessly bombed by the regime.
Drawings sketched by these children speak volumes of how people in Gaza have been traumatised by 11 months of genocidal war, which has obliterated every trace of humanity in the blockaded territory.
The Israeli regime has been indiscriminately dropping bombs supplied by the United States on densely populated residential areas of Gaza, killing innocent civilians in daily massacres.
Recently released data from the health ministry in Gaza reveals that the Israeli regime has killed at least 115 infants born during what is widely described as the ‘bloodiest’ war of the 21st century.
A total of 3,524 massacres have been committed by the occupation forces in the past 326 days, with thousands of people still trapped under the rubble and unaccounted for.
The percentage of child and women victims of the war is 69, according to the Palestinian health ministry. The number of children who have lost one of their parents in the genocidal war is 17,000.
Last month, UN experts sounded the alarm about the Palestinian children in the besieged territory losing their lives due to the Israeli regime’s deliberate ‘starvation campaign’.
In a separate report, the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees in June said an average of 10 children per day are losing one or both legs due to Israeli savagery in the Gaza Strip.
