Raisi: Cruelty against Palestinians won’t go on forever
Israeli death toll almost twice that of Gaza
Two days after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group launched a surprise attack against Israel, which was met with a bombardment of civilian targets in the Gaza Strip, the death toll from the Israeli side is reported to be nearly double that of the Palestinians.
The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza has updated the death toll to 380, adding that some 2,200 others have been wounded as a result of the ongoing Israeli attack on the besieged coastal enclave, according to Al Jazeera.
Israeli air strikes hit housing blocks, tunnels, a mosque, and homes of Hamas officials in Gaza as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed “mighty vengeance for this wicked day.”
The UN agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, said over 20,000 people were sheltering in 44 of its schools around Gaza by Saturday evening. “The number (of displaced) is rapidly increasing,” said Inas Hamdan, acting public information officer in Gaza.
The agency said three of its schools suffered “collateral” damage from Israeli airstrikes. The agency also said its operations of nine water wells around the Gaza Strip were stopped early Saturday. Operations in three wells resumed Sunday, said Hamdan. The agency’s food distribution centers, which provide for over 540,000 of Gaza residents, have been closed since Saturday.
In southern Israel, supported by a multi-pronged assault of rocket barrages, Hamas fighters fought Israeli security in army bases and towns and killed at least 659 people, according to Israeli TV.
A flare-up on Israel’s northern border also threatened to draw into the battle Hezbollah, a fierce enemy of Israel’s, which is estimated to have tens of thousands of rockets at its disposal, AP reported.
Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets and shells on Sunday at three Israeli positions in a disputed area along the border and Israel’s military fired back using armed drones.
Reactions pour in
Lauding the Palestinian resistance for the “history-making” move against Israeli cruelty and acts of aggression, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi expressed the Islamic Republic’s support for the Palestinian nation’s legitimate right to defense.
In a message released on Sunday, the Iranian president called on the world to wake up to the reality that the accumulation of cruelty and injustice against the Palestinian nation, the continued harassment of Palestinian women and prisoners, and the constant desecration of Al-Aqsa Mosque won’t go on forever and will be faced with the resistance of nations.
In separate phone calls with Ziyad al-Nakhalah, Secretary General of the Palestine Islamic Jihad, and Ismail Haniyeh, head of the political bureau of Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, on Sunday, President Raisi reviewed the situation underway in the occupied lands.
Tasnim news agency also quoted Raisi as saying, “The Zionist regime and its supporters are responsible for instability in the region”.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said President Joe Biden’s direction was to “make sure that we’re providing Israel everything it needs in this moment.”
He added that disrupting a potential normalization of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia could certainly be part of the motivation for Hamas’s attack.
The world’s largest bloc of Muslim countries has condemned what it refers to as “Israeli military aggression.” The Saudi-based Organization of Islamic Cooperation said Sunday that it is “greatly concerned about the developments on the ground and the dangerous Israeli escalation in the occupied Palestinian territory.”
A senior White House official said Saturday it was “too early to say” whether Israel’s arch-foe Iran was “directly involved” in the large-scale attack by Palestinian resistance group Hamas.
Clare Daly, an Irish member of the European Parliament, criticized the double standards adopted by the EU Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen for condemning Hamas, saying that Leyen is “criminally giving Israel carte blanche for the spectacle of shocking violence it will now unleash against desperate civilians caged in Gaza, dressed up as self-defense.”