JERUSALEM – Palestinian leaders have condemned Israel’s ongoing offensive in northern Gaza, labelling the actions as war crimes and genocide aimed at uprooting the Palestinian people from their ancestral lands.
Rawhi Fattouh, Speaker of the Palestinian National Council, stated on Friday that the Israeli occupation’s assault and siege on northern Gaza represent ‘a moral degradation and brutality unimaginable to human minds’. He emphasised that these actions reflect ‘an occupation that disregards international humanitarian law and human rights principles’.
Fattouh pointed to the encirclement and bombing of entire residential areas, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of innocents left under the rubble of their homes and on the sides of roads. He asserted that this is clear evidence of ‘the tyranny of the Israeli regime, emboldened by Western support and American protection’.
He affirmed that the continuous neglect by the US administration of the suffering of the Palestinian people, along with its ‘partnership and complicity with the occupation’, is the main reason for the ongoing genocide and mass killings in northern Gaza and throughout the territory.
Meanwhile, the Hamas Movement announced on Thursday the launch of an intensive political and diplomatic campaign to thwart the ‘Israeli General’s Plan’, and to halt Israel’s crimes in the Gaza Strip, specifically in the north.
In a statement, Hamas warned against implementing the General’s Plan, cautioning about the consequent ‘destruction, bloody massacres, organised displacement, deprivation of food, medicine, and water, and the destruction of the entire infrastructure, especially hospitals, in northern Gaza’.
The Movement noted that senior-level Hamas delegations are currently visiting Turkey, Qatar, and Russia, while contacts are being conducted with Egypt, the United Nations, and Iran. It added that communications with a number of other countries would take place soon.
Abdul Rahman Shadid, a Hamas official, called for an uprising in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and within the 1948 occupied territories against the Israeli occupation to ‘make it pay for its crimes in the Gaza Strip’.
He stated that ‘silence is no longer acceptable in the face of such Israeli crimes’ and urged for the besieging of Israeli embassies and those of all pro-Israel countries.