“We congratulate the resisting people of Gaza and Palestine on the occasion of this victory. They stood up to Israel with strength and esteem, and attained this great achievement,” the chief executive said during a meeting on Monday.
“This resisting people taught other nations how they should stand up to terrorism,” he added.
The remarks came after implementation of the first phase of a cease-fire deal between the regime and the resistance movement Hamas.
The president referred to the massacres that the regime and its supporters had committed within Gaza’s small geographical area, which claimed the lives of more than 47,000 Palestinians as “an instance of terrorism.”
The truce in the 15-month-old conflict, which has laid waste to the Gaza Strip and inflamed the Middle East, took effect on Sunday with the release of the first three hostages held by Hamas and 90 Palestinians freed from Israeli jails.
The skies above Gaza and Israel were silent for the first time in over a year, and Palestinians began returning to what was left of the homes they fled across the war-ravaged territory, started to check on relatives left behind and, in many cases, to bury their dead. After months of tight Israeli restrictions, more than 600 trucks carrying humanitarian aid rolled into the devastated territory.
The grisly search for an estimated 10,000 bodies buried under the concrete wasteland in Gaza is now under way, the civil defense agency said, with at least 62 of the dead recovered.
What happens after the deal’s first phase of 42 days is uncertain. The agreement’s subsequent stages call for more releases of hostages and prisoners and a permanent end to the war.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was pressured by the outgoing Biden administration and incoming Trump administration to secure a deal before the president-elect’s inauguration Monday in Washington, has said he received assurances from Trump that Israel could continue fighting Hamas if necessary.
Hamas: Gaza ‘will rise again’
Hamas said Monday that Gaza and its people “will rise again” and rebuild the territory battered by more than 15 months of Israeli bombardment.
“Gaza, with its great people and its resilience, will rise again to rebuild what the occupation has destroyed and continue on the path of steadfastness until the occupation is defeated,” Hamas said in a statement issued on the second day of the cease-fire.
Despite killing more than 47,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military failed to eliminate Hamas politically or militarily.
Netanyahu continues to receive criticism for failing to “wipe out” Hamas as he pledged to do.
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador, noted neither Hamas’s political nor military infrastructure was entirely eradicated despite Netanyahu repeatedly citing it as the main goal of the war.