Jenin victory, new phase of resistance ‘beginning of the end’ for Israeli regime

By Hiba Morad

On Monday, when the marauding Israeli forces raided Jenin, Walid and other young Palestinian men in the flashpoint city decided to help the resistance fighters and set tires on fire to block the vision of the Israeli regime soldiers trying to enter the city.

The 27-year-old Palestinian told the Press TV website that the city was filled with plumes of black smoke and eye-burning tear gas and many homes and buildings were turning into piles of rubble.

Walid said the city and its buildings were "literally shaking" due to high-intensity explosions and the streets were "littered with shattered glass and bullet casings" but that was not something that would have compelled young Palestinians to retreat or surrender.

Videos that went viral online showed Palestinian youth vowing not to leave Jenin and its resistance brigades alone as they returned to the city and started cleaning and repairing the damaged areas.

Some videos showed Palestinians celebrating another Israeli defeat in the early hours of Wednesday morning in the Jenin camp and hailing the courageous Palestinian fighters.

“We, the Palestinian youth, are not afraid of cowardly Israelis who were forced to retreat and withdraw. May the souls of our martyrs rest in peace,” Walid told the Press TV website.

“It is painful for their families and for all of us but al-Hamdulilah (Thank God) we can confidently say the usurper regime did not achieve what it wanted and now Israelis know that the Palestinians are stronger and it is harder for them to attack us,” he hastened to add.

The young man, whose mother and younger siblings were forced to leave the city after the Israeli raid, said he and his friends will never leave Jenin in the event of any future confrontation and will remain to support and back the resistance brigades.

“We will never leave the resistance fighters alone. You know, one Palestinian resistance fighter is worth more than a hundred Israeli soldiers because they are cowards,” he remarked.

“We are aware of this, the Israelis should understand this too. They are cowardly and they are unable to crush our men or the Palestinian people.”

New equation, new phase of resistance

Jenin produced a new equation for a new phase of resistance: Any Israeli attempt to attack Jenin or other parts of occupied Palestine will be confronted firmly and will inflict heavy losses on the regime.

“It was an asymmetric war in which dozens of young Palestinian men with humble and primary weapons were able to defeat at least one thousand Israeli soldiers equipped with billions-of-dollars-worth weapons,” Palestinian political analyst Annan Najib told the Press TV website from Jerusalem al-Quds.

For him and other Palestinian analysts who have closely followed the developments in the occupied Palestinian territories in the last few years, Israeli defeat was imminent this time.

Following the Israeli pullout, the secretary general of the Islamic Jihad resistance movement Ziad al-Nakhalah said that the Palestinian nation managed to record a glorious victory by ending Israel’s aggression against the Jenin refugee camp and forcing its troops to withdraw from the site.

“The Palestinian nation, through unity and offering unwavering support to resistance fighters, proved they can defeat the Zionist enemy,” Nakhalah said.

“Palestinians have proven that they can overwhelm the Israeli occupation forces in any battle no matter what the situation could be, as was the case in Operation Sword al-Quds [carried out in May 2021] and the latest retaliatory operations in Jenin.”

Hamas' Political Bureau Chief Ismail Haniyeh also congratulated the Palestinian nation on the glorious triumph against the occupying entity, the Palestinian Information Center news agency reported.

"We say this to the Zionist enemy that their days when it would perpetrate crimes against the Palestinian nation without paying the price are over," he was quoted as saying.

Annan told the Press TV website that it is “legend-like to see the West Bank and its icon of resistance, Jenin city, no longer an easy target to the Israeli army.”

“In order to invade less than 450-meter square, Israel needed to deploy one thousand armed soldiers but it was forced to retreat in less than 48 hours this is phenomenal,” he remarked.

In the “post-Jenin defeat” phase, Annan added that there is no doubt that the Israelis “will think thousand times” before making any new move or launching a large-scale assault.

United Palestinian resistance front

Meanwhile, a Palestinian journalist residing in Jenin, Mohammad Jaradat, told the Press TV website that the flashpoint city has recorded a “new era in the history of the Palestinian cause.”

“This is how I sum up the scene here in Jenin: A group of Palestinian young men forced Israel’s Oz Brigades dedicated entirely to special operations to withdraw along with all military armored vehicles and war jets.”

According to him, Jenin’s victory paves the way for greater resilience and unity among the Palestinian people, which was evident from Gaza’s retaliatory rockets on Israeli settlements.

“Of course, the Gaza retaliatory rockets are not unprecedented, but are an example of the increasing unity among all Palestinian resistance groups which frustrates Israel and prompts it to initiate such attacks that are to no avail,” Jaradat noted.

Resistance fighters launched a series of rockets from Gaza toward the occupied territories over the regime’s military aggression on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank on Wednesday.

The beginning of the end for Israel

Analysts believe that previous Israeli aggressions during the “Operation al-Quds Sword” and the “Unity of Arenas” battles as well as the confrontations in al-Quds and the Gaza Strip have made the Israeli military and its soldiers realize that they lack decisiveness and are not in control of the situation.

Also, they think Israeli illegal settlers feel that the Israeli occupation army is unable to protect them.

Lebanese political analyst Dr. Talal Atrisi told the Press TV website that the main goal of the Israeli aggression on Jenin was “to retrieve the power of deterrence it had lost earlier in several Palestinian arenas and battles but the attempt resulted in total failure.”

“Israel with its might and military elite was defeated by a group of young men who only had a very limited military expertise and very modest weapons. The Israeli well-equipped army entered Jenin city with all its force to crush the Palestinian resistance, but was confronted with a strong will, force and qualitative operations and was in return crushed and forced to leave,” he asserted.

This defeat, he said, marks the “beginning to the end” of the Israeli apartheid regime.

Many can’t help but recall what happened in Lebanon more than two decades ago when Israeli troops were forced out of South Lebanon in humiliation.

In May 2000, Colonel Noam Ben-Tzvi (ret.), the last commander of the Israeli army’s western sector in south Lebanon, was quoted as saying by Haaretz that it “wasn't a withdrawal” but a “retreat.”

“We ran away, pure and simple,” he admitted.

History repeats itself

History repeated itself once again in the occupied Palestinian territories this week as the resistance fighters in a spirit of remarkable unity inflicted another crushing defeat on the occupying regime.

The Israeli army had turned the occupied West Bank city of Jenin into a warzone in a characteristically aggressive assault that started on Monday in order to “crush” the Palestinian resistance.

The resistance front – and the Jenin Brigades in particular – broke the vicious cycle, forcing the occupying army to withdraw only two days after it launched the deadly war on the flashpoint city.

Israeli warplanes raided the poverty-stricken city in the northern West Bank, with airstrikes destroying buildings while bulldozers advanced to wipe out the city streets.

Israeli snipers and soldiers, according to eyewitnesses, appeared to randomly kill Palestinians on the streets and used Palestinian women, children and the elderly as human shields while forcing them out of the city in an attempt to crush the resistance and destroy the morale of the Palestinian people.

The Israeli army mobilized some 1,000 troops to damage the resistance “infrastructure” in the city and the refugee camp that it hosts but failed.

At least 12 Palestinians were killed in the aggression but not before they registered another glorious victory for the resistance in the city that has become a focal point in the fight against the apartheid.

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