THE chief commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has said the more destruction the Israeli regime wreaks in Palestine, the more nails they will drive into their own coffin.
Major General Hossein Salami made the remarks on Sunday at a ceremony in Tehran to commemorate those killed in the Iraqi-imposed war on Iran (1980-1988).
He said the Palestinian people will continue to resist Israeli occupation, and the United States and the Israeli regime are doomed to failure in their war on Gaza.
‘In the war in Palestine, the more Israeli forces destroy, the more nails they drive into their own coffin,’ Salami said, urging the Israeli forces to fight in the battlefield like real warriors, rather than turning hospitals into battlefields.
‘Rest assured, that Palestinians will never die away by martyrdom, and as Imam Khomeini said, a nation blessed with martyrdom will never face enslavement.’
The IRGC chief added that the Iranian people will support Palestine until its people’s struggle to free their land from the Israeli occupation is won.
Elsewhere in his speech, Salami said hatred of the United States has spread all over the world, and American officials do not dare to show up in any Islamic country, as Muslim nations are infuriated with US-backed war crimes in the Gaza Strip.
Addressing American officials, he said: ‘Wherever you go, you’d face hatred and insecurity from the nations.’
The top Iranian commander said the war in Palestine has once again exposed the brutality and crimes of the enemy.
‘The US is repeating its mistakes of the past 45 years and thinks it will reach victory through occupation of lands,’ Salami said, adding that the developments in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria demonstrate that the Americans are being forced to withdraw from different countries.
He also said that the American leaders, instead of solving their country’s domestic problems, where some 50 million citizens are living below poverty line, have spent American taxpayers’ dollars on failed wars in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The IRGC chief commander also pointed out that Israel has been defeated by the resistance of the Palestinian people as well as its own mistakes.
He also pointed out that Iran is a great world power and no country dares to attack it while all its neighbouring countries are at war.
Pointing to Iraq’s war of aggression against Iran in the 1980s, Salami said the Islamic Republic’s enemies planned to make the Iranian nation regret its revolution and prove that it’s impossible to form an independent government without relying on evil powers.
‘They tried to make this land the focus of all the fires accumulated in their warehouses and planned to steal our identity and rule our destiny, but with the sacrifice of our nation and with the guardianship of Imam Khomeini, all their plots were thwarted,’ he added.
Salami further lashed out at the Americans for provoking serious conflicts among Muslim nations and imposing a blockade on the Gaza Strip while preventing the establishment of a ceasefire there.
Meanwhile, fighters from the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement have continued their strikes on Israeli military position close to the border between Lebanon and the occupied territories, in response to the Tel Aviv regime’s war on Gaza.
Lebanon’s Arabic-language al-Mayadeen television news channel, citing a Hezbollah statement released on Sunday, reported that the group had targeted Israeli forces at the Birkat Risha outpost in the north of the occupied Palestinian lands, causing casualties among the troops.
Several Israeli troopers were also injured when additional strikes hit near the Hanita military facility, situated which is approximately 15 kilometres (9.3 miles) northeast of Nahariya.
Hezbollah said on Saturday that it had mounted two attacks on the Birkat Risha Israeli post inflicting deaths and injuries.
Media reports said four Israeli soldiers were wounded in the attacks, one of them critically.
Hezbollah also staged seven more anti-Israel operations in support of Gaza on Friday, and later announced attacks on four more Israeli posts, targeting groups of Israeli soldiers.
Israeli artillery shelling, meanwhile, targeted the Wadi Hassan area on the outskirts of the Lebanese border town of al-Jibbain as well as the suburbs of the Lebanese towns of Khiam, Deir Mimas, Blida, Houla, Mays al-Jabal and Kfarkila.
In a statement, Hezbollah announced the death of one its fighters, Radwan Hammoudi, who hailed from the southern city of Tyre.
Later on Saturday, Israeli media outlets reported alert sirens in the northern part of the occupied territories and explosions in the Upper Galilee area.
The Israeli regime has been waging sporadic attacks on southern Lebanon since October 7th, when it launched a devastating war against the besieged Gaza Strip.
Hezbollah has mounted near daily rocket attacks on Israeli positions at the border, while Israel has conducted air and artillery strikes in southern Lebanon.
More than 120 people have been killed on the Lebanese side of the border since October 7th, mostly Hezbollah fighters, and more than a dozen civilians, according to media reports.
Israel says at least six of its soldiers and four settlers have been killed in the area, and the Lebanese army lost a soldier.
Seventeen Lebanese civilians, three of them journalists, have also lost their lives in the exchanges.
- Palestinian resistance group Hamas says it has informed all sides mediating talks between the Palestinian resistance group and Israel that it will engage in no discussions on a prisoner-for-abductee swap unless the occupying regime completely ends its onslaught on the Gaza Strip.
‘Hamas reaffirms its stance not to conduct any negotiations to exchange prisoners unless the Zionist aggression against our people stops once and for all,’ the movement said in a statement on Sunday, adding that it had ‘conveyed this position to all mediators.’
Israel waged the brutal war on Gaza on October 7th after Hamas carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the usurping entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
Since the start of the offensive, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 19,088 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 54,450 others.
As part of a week-long humanitarian ceasefire, brokered by Qatar and Egypt, fighting was paused and humanitarian aid was allowed to enter Gaza, which is under ‘complete siege’ by Israel. It also saw an exchange between 240 Palestinian abductees held by Israel and 105 war prisoners, including 81 Israelis and 24 foreigners, in Gaza.
Israel believes about 137 prisoners are still being held in Gaza, while there are thought to be 7,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, many detained without charge.
- The Palestine Liberation Organisation Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs Authority has revealed that female Palestinian detainees from the Gaza Strip, particularly those arrested since October 7th, are facing inhumane conditions in Israeli jails.
According to the Authority’s lawyers, incarcerated Palestinian women from Gaza are enduring torture and abuse from the first moment of arrest, including beatings, insults, strip searches, solitary confinement, and deprivation of basic rights.
All female prisoners from Gaza undergo degrading treatment, it added, including the confiscation of their clothes replaced with summer attire (it is currently Winter and very cold in the area).
They also face relentless physical assaults, insults, and verbal abuse.
A shocking incident involved an elderly woman, aged 80, from Gaza who arrived at the Israeli prison of Damon, despite walking with a cane; she was brought to prison without a hijab, with her face covered in blood, said the authority.
In another heartbreaking account, a Gaza mother, detained while she was accompanying her four young children, was forced to hand them over to an unknown man before being taken away by Israeli soldiers, uncertain about her children’s fate.
The Authority stressed that these documented testimonies represent only a fraction of the reality, as prison authorities purposefully isolate Gaza detainees from others and the outside world, which enables them to continue their violations without scrutiny.
