A SENIOR official of the Hamas resistance movement has described Israel as a threat to humanity, saying Palestine’s anti-occupation struggle is a humanitarian cause concerning not just the Muslim nations but the whole world.
The Palestinian cause is not just an Arab-Muslim cause, but a humanitarian cause conveying the important message that ‘the occupation force is not only against the Palestinians alone, but against entire humanity’. So said Osama Hamdan, Hamas’s top representative in Lebanon, in an interview with Press TV on Thursday.
The Israeli enemy only speaks with ‘the language of force and violence,’ presuming that ‘breaking the will and determination of people’ would help it achieve hegemonic dominance and steal more land, he said.
The senior Hamas official added that the regime’s tactic is to portray itself as an ‘invincible’ entity that cannot be conquered in the eyes of the resistance forces.
But such tactics, he said, are futile as the Israeli regime has been intimidated by the resistance groups both in Palestine and Lebanon.
Despite decades of relentless attempts, Hamdan added, the regime has not succeeded in securing recognition as a legitimate entity from free nations.
Hamdan also referred to pro-Israeli propaganda that the mainstream Western media have been spreading.
The world is, however, well aware of the plight of Palestinians, despite Western media attempt to misrepresent the realities on the ground, he said.
The al-Aqsa Mosque compound has been at the centre of weeks of ramped-up Israeli aggression against Palestinian worshippers.
He also censured fellow Arab states for sitting idly by in the face of Israeli occupation, refraining from acting or intervening, and silently watching what is happening in Palestine.
And now, some Arab governments and Israel are even attempting to form an alliance to launch more wars in the region, the Hamas official said.
Hamdan also commented on the importance of observing the upcoming International Quds Day, introduced by the late founder of Iran’s Islamic Republic, Imam Khomeini, with the aim of keeping Israeli occupation of Palestine in focus.
He described Imam Khomeini’s designation as a ‘very significant phase in the history’ of the Palestinian struggles against Israeli occupation.
The Hamas official is in Iran to join the events marking the Quds Day.
- Israeli forces have stormed the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin and delivered a military demolition order against the house of a Palestinian man killed by the regime’s troops.
According to local sources, the Israeli forces raided Jenin at dawn Wednesday. They put up a demolition notice on the door of an apartment belonging to a Palestinian youth, identified as Ra’ad Fathi Hazem, the Palestinian Information Centre reported.
The young Palestinian was accused of shooting three Israelis dead and injuring several others earlier this month.
The order gave Hazem’s family one week to file a petition against the measure.
The 28-year-old Hazem, a resident of the Jenin refugee camp, was killed by Israeli forces in a pre-dawn firefight near a mosque on the first Friday of the holy fasting month of Ramadan.
Palestinian resistance groups have hailed the ‘heroic operation’ as a ‘natural and legitimate response to the escalation of the occupation’s crimes.’
At least two people are killed and eight others are injured during a shooting attack in the heart of Tel Aviv.
The Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah has also lauded the shooting attack in Tel Aviv, saying the Palestinian operation once again brought to the fore the fragility and weakness of the occupying regime.
The occupying regime has since the start of Ramadan scaled up its crackdown on Palestinians who gather for Iftar, a meal served at the end of the fasting day during the holy month. Israel has also deployed a large number of its forces to disperse the worshippers. The violence, repeated on a daily basis, has led to fierce clashes between Israelis and Palestinians across the occupied territories.
Health officials said on Wednesday that Israeli forces shot and killed a young Palestinian man in Jenin, as the military carries out wide-ranging arrests across the West Bank.
Israeli forces have killed a Palestinian man and wounded three others after they carried out a predawn raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern part of the occupied West Bank.
The man was identified as 21-year-old Ahmad Muhammad Lotfi Massad, a resident of the town of Burqin, during a raid on the Jenin refugee camp.
- An independent Irish Member of the European Parliament (MEP) has criticised the US government for imposing sanctions on various countries around the world, including Iran, denouncing the move as ‘a crime against humanity’
Mick Wallace made the remarks in a post on his Twitter account on Thursday, while referring to the recent death of former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, whom he called a ‘war criminal.’
‘Sanctions on Iraq, which war criminal Madeleine Albright thought “were worth it”, were a collective punishment against the people of Iraq, that killed 500,000 children,’ Wallace tweeted.
He added that those sanctions amounted to ‘a crime against humanity,’ just like the ones imposed on Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, and Afghanistan.
The US, under former president Donald Trump, launched what it called a maximum pressure campaign against Iran at the time, targeting the Iranian nation with the ‘toughest ever’ sanctions.
Although Trump failed to reach its professed goals with his maximum pressure campaign, the bans have badly hurt the Iranian population.
Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as the US secretary of state, has blood on her hands, said American political analyst and activist Myles Hoenig.
Albright died on March 23 at the age of 84. She served as America’s top diplomat during the administration of former US president Bill Clinton. Albright is widely held responsible for the death of countless Iraqi kids.
In a 1996 interview, on the subject that a half million Iraqi children have died as a result of US sanctions, when Albright was asked was the price worth it, she responded, ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.’
