Eurasia Press & News
‘There is a new generation of people who believe the only solution is armed struggle’
A spokesman for the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group called on Israeli Arabs to start an intifada, an armed uprising.
Speaking after large-scale military drills were held in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday, Abu Hamza threatened that “the Islamic Jihad will cause the stupid enemy to be worn down by launching rockets in its direction, since the organization has many other means of warfare that will hurt the enemy.”
“We call on all the fighters among our people and the free people in the West Bank and in Israel to mobilize for this war, so that there will be an overall intifada that will create the basis for the end of our enemy and its expulsion from all of Palestine,” he said.
“We will turn the so-called Gaza envelope, including cities and the occupied colonies, into a place that cannot be lived in, and we will launch rockets to ever further ranges,” Hamza claimed.
Tensions in the West Bank and Gaza have been high in recent months with the increased number of terror attacks carried out against Israelis, and the Israeli military responding with regular counter-terrorism raids that often lead to armed clashes. As the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and the Jewish Passover approach, concerns of more violence are growing.
“All the signs are that the intifada is coming,” a Hamas cadre in the West Bank city of Jericho, who declined to be named, told Reuters. “There is a new generation of people who believe the only solution is armed struggle.”
“The number of fighters is growing all the time and the enemy needs to know that violence against our people and our camps is increasing their number not reducing it,” a masked gunman from the Jenin Brigade, a recently established Palestinian militant group, told Reuters.
According to the outlet, over the past year more than 200 Palestinians, both militants and civilians, have been killed, about 80 of them this year alone, while over 40 Israelis and foreign nationals were murdered in terror attacks by Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank. Earlier in March, Israel Defense And Security Forum Director-general Yaron Bouskila told i24NEWS that Israel was on the precipice of a major violent Palestinian uprising.
