12 July 2006

In Gaza, Palestinian Resistance to Apartheid Israel's Blitzkrieg Intensifies

Apartheid Israel escalated its attack on Palestinian Gaza on Tuesday night, intensifying their aerial bombardment, leveling Palestinian farmland, and deploying infantry and tanks into central Gaza for the first time since the most recent operation began.

While ground forces moved a few hundred meters into Gaza, the Zionist occupiers' most brazen attack was an F-16 air raid launched in Gaza City nominally targetting Commander-General Muhammad Deif and other members of Hamas's military wing, the Izzeddin Al-Qassam Brigade. The strike failed to take out Dief, but Ma'an reports that it "killed at least nine Palestinian citizens from one family, including Dr. Abu Selmiyah, his wife Salwa Matar, 40, their four sons and two children one recently born."

In a statement released shortly after the attack, the Brigade promised retaliation:
Our reaction to this massacre will be painful and strong for the Zionists and we will make the enemy leadership sorry for their crime.

This new crime is a changing point in the rules of the battle. We will choose the rules of the game in the coming period.

Our message to the Zionists is that your leaders are leading you to violence from which no one will be safe and when they target civilians they decided for you to be the target of our resistance.
Yesterday's escalation in violence comes after a brief lull in the Zionist ground assault after its retreat from the areas of Northern Gaza that it re-occupied last week, a pullback resulting from the furious Palestinian Resistance coupled with the storm of international outcry that followed from the more than 60 Paletinian civilians killed by the Zionist blitzkrieg.

In spite of their heavy losses, both Hamas's Izzeddin Al-Qassam Brigades and the Popular Resistance Committee's An Nasser Salah Addin Brigades continue to resist the Zionist invasion.

Warning last weekend that "Olmert's chair will be shaken, and the Israeli plans which aim to slaughter the Palestinian cause will fail," and pledging to "fight the enemy inside his own home because this enemy is commiting crimes against our people and conducting a war against everything which is Palestinian," PRC spokesman Abu Mujahid called for the Palestinian people to be "patient as the pain of the enemy is more than our pain."

On Saturday afternoon, Ma'an reported that the Brigades "shot an Israeli soldier and destroyed a tank eastern Gaza," stating that "the soldier was stationed on top of a tank at Mansurah in eastern Gaza."

Also on Saturday, the Izzeddin Al-Qassam Brigade's spokesman:
Presented parts of destroyed Israeli tanks, armored vehicles and bulldozers after the Israeli forces withdrew from the region that they raided for two days in northern Gaza...

Eyewitnesses in the region confirmed that during the invasion about 30 Israeli military vehicles were exploded and burned in front of their eyes while Israeli tanks surrounded them and invaded their homes, carrying out arrest operations.
During the course of the Zionist blitzkrieg, the Al-Qassam Brigades have launched a litany of successful military operations, attacking tanks, military positions, and firing 'Qassam' rockets against the Jim Crow city of Ashkelon similar to those other groups have fired elsewhere.

Crucially though, Hamas and the PRC are not the only groups resisting the Zionist onslaught. This hydra-headed and dynamic Palestinian Resistance has dramatically complicated the situation for Apartheid Israel, challenging the invasion in myriad ways in a host of forms.

The Fatah-affiliated Al Aqsa Brigades continues to launch rocket attacks against the Zionist-occupied Jim Crow city of Sderot in response to "Israeli aggressions against the Palestinian people and children in the Gaza Strip."

Additionally, Al Aqsa recently announced the launching of joint operations with two other military organizations, the DFLP affiliated National Resistance Brigades and the PFLP's military wing, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades. On 8 July, the three groups fired 2 more rockets into Sderot "in response to Israeli massacres and aggressions against the Palestinian people in the northern Gaza Strip and in response to the ongoing Israeli air strikes against the Strip."

Earlier today, the same three groups announced that they had "launched two homemade projectiles at a group of Israeli soldiers and military vehicles stationed in the area of Nahal Oz... east of Gaza City outside the Gaza Strip."

Monday evening, Al Aqsa and Islamic Jihad's military wing, the Al Quds Brigades, told Ma'an that they had, "successfully launched projectiles from the West Bank at towns inside Israel for the first time," a move that marks a qualitative transformation in the ability of the Palestinian Resistance to strike into the heart of Apartheid Israel. The report continues:
[The groups] claimed responsibility for launching of homemade projectiles from the West Bank towns of Jenin and Tulkarem at towns on the Israeli side of the Green Line.

In a statement, the two military groups said that the launching operation was to commemorate the death of the engineers of the projectiles in the West Bank, Warrad and Ibrahem Abahrah, who died in 2005.

The two military wings said that they will continue the launching operations if "Israel does not stop its aggression against the Gaza Strip".
On Saturday, the Palestine News Network reported from Tulkarem on the formation of a new Resistance group that vowed to "continue to struggle on the path to liberalization while responding to the Zionist enemy and ensuring sleepless nights for Israelis.” The group, named the Majd Brigades, "claimed responsibility for attempting to launch grenades at Israeli territory from the city of Tulkarem in the northeastern West Bank."

The depth of animosity in Palestine towards Apartheid Israel's savage and barbaric policies have provided a swamp of resentment in which the guerrilla resistance can flourish. Despite the unexpected intensity of their resistance, however, the Palestinian demands of Apartheid Israel remain unchanged. At a press conference on Monday, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal re-affirmed this, saying:
We have told mediators and those who made political efforts [to end the crisis] we support the peaceful, calm handling of this matter but you need to understand the needs of the Palestinian people.

They talk about one soldier, we have 10,000 detainees, including 400 minors and 120 women ... this is why we are seeking a prisoner exchange.

The solution is simple: swap. But Israel rejects this. The mediators in Europe know this, but they are incapable.
Ha'aretz noted additionally that, "Meshal termed Shalit 'a captive' who 'was captured in a clean military operation.'" Addressing the leaders of the Apartheid government directly, he asked, "You made prisoner-exchange deals in the past. Why won't you make another deal now?"

Of course Meshaal asks the question rhetorically. He knows exactly why the Apartheid government of Israel continues to defy the will of the world: the desire to collectively punish the Palestinian people for electing Hamas.

Over the last two weeks since Shalit's abduction, this collective punishment, which midwifed the fierce and unified Resistance, has become ubiquitous. the Independent on Monday detailed the attack on a Palestinian family during a family barbecue.
Speaking from Gaza City's Shifa hospital, [12-year-old] Rani Hajaj, a leg and arm both in plaster, covered in shrapnel cuts, and with one eye closed, said that as they sat in the yard behind the house on Saturday evening they could hear an unmanned Israeli drone overhead but added that there had been no shooting in the area at the time.

"Suddenly the drone rocketed us. The force was so great that one of my brothers was lifted over the fence. My father carried me and gave me to my sister and they called someone from the street and put me in an ambulance. I didn't feel anything at first but then it hurt a lot."

His father had come into the yards seconds after the blast after seeing a guest off at the front door. Rani said that his older brothers Khaled and Shaban had been doing the barbecuing and that his third brother, Mohammed 27, who was killed, had been "cut to pieces". His sister Ruan, six, and his mother Amuna, 50, were also killed.
As in last night's attack, its effects took shape elsewhere in the form of a ramped-up aerial assault.
  • In Beit Hanoun, the IAF massacred four youths, injuring six others "with a new type of Israeli shell, a shell of nails."
  • Three Palestinians were killed - a mother and her two children - and several more injured during an 8 July artillery bombardment of a house east of Gaza City.
  • Maan reported on Tuesday that "fifteen month old Khalid Wahbah, who was critically injured in an Israeli air strike on Khan Younis on 21 June, died on Monday in the Israeli hospital where he was receiving treatment."
  • Ha'aretz reports that, "an 11-year-old Palestinian boy seriously wounded in an Israel Defense Forces strike last week near his home in the northern Gaza Strip died on Tuesday of his wounds." The same paper reports that on Monday "the IAF fired missiles on the teenagers as they were playing soccer in the field outside of the agricultural college in Beit Hanun."
Palestine News Net also reports that like Uncle Sam in Iraq, the Zionist air force has begun to use chemcial weapons against Palestinian civilans:
The Palestinian Ministry of Health revealed that the Israelis recently used a new kind of explosive which does not cause immediate injuries, but contains radioactive toxic materials, causing long-term damage.

In a special report compiled in accordance with the Certificate of Surgical Specialists in Hospitals, the Ministry of Health explained, that all Palestinians injured during the latest wave of Israeli attacks were in large part due to fragments from new missiles which lead to amputation as entire limbs become infected due to an internal tissue breakdown...

The report describes a type of internal combustion which leads to incurable internal infection, causing bleeding and burns, leaving no choice but to amputate. Some of those who have died were infected in the internal organs such as the spleen.
The occupier army has also ramped up their policy of kidnappings, arresting "five Palestinians Tuesday afternoon in the southern West Bank town of Hebron," according to Palestine News Net. Six more were abducted from the Tulkarem refugee camp on Tuesday while seventeen others were captured throughout the West Bank.

While we should assume that these and similar attacks will continue, today's military operation by Hizbullah will in all likelyhood change Apartheid Israel's operating framework as its ongoing war intensifies on yet another front. As this military confrontation spreads, the reasonable demands made by Hamas of releasing a tiny fraction of the more than 9,000 political prisoners Apartheid Israel holds will continue to gain support.

Whether this can or will happen given the Zionist's political reality is another matter. That being said, the assault on Gaza and the military defeat that will result from this operation cannot possibly be Apartheid Israel's endgame.