Israel deluded to think it can wrest control over West Bank: Islamic Jihad

The Islamic Jihad says the criminal cabinet of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be completely deluded if it believes it is capable of wresting control over the occupied West Bank and annexing it.

The Gaza Strip-based Palestinian resistance movement issued a statement on Tuesday, a week after the occupying entity launched a massive bloody offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank.

“The brutal aggression on the occupied West Bank enters its seventh day, with the criminal ‘Israeli’ Nazi occupation army continuing its onslaught, committing all forms of war crimes, including field executions, random arrests, brutal torture, hospital sieges, home demolitions, forced displacement of residents, destruction of infrastructure, and the fragmentation of regions, all amid international and Arab silence, which grants the enemy a green light to continue its blatant aggression,” the resistance movement said.

In the early hours of August 28, the Israeli military conducted its biggest operation – dubbed “Camps of Summer” – in the West Bank in over 20 years, deploying hundreds of troops and airstrikes on Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas, which are major centers of Palestinian resistance against the occupying entity.

“Throughout the days of this aggression, resistance fighters in the West Bank have been valiantly confronting the onslaught, executing heroic and qualitative operations against the enemy soldiers at every point of engagement, inflicting casualties in their ranks in defense of our people, our land, and our sanctities, fulfilling their duty in the face of this aggression,” the Islamic Jihad added.

The ongoing military aggression in the West Bank is currently concentrated in the city of Jenin, whose streets and infrastructure have been damaged by over 70 percent since the onset of the “Camps of Summer”, according to its municipality.

Israeli forces destroyed over 70% of Jenin's streets, infrastructure, says municipality

The Israeli army has destroyed over 70% of the streets and infrastructure in the northern West Bank city of Jenin during its ongoing military offensive, the local municipality says.

The Islamic Jihad further said that the “criminal” cabinet of “Benjamin Netanyahu is deluded if it believes it can advance its plan to extend its control over the occupied West Bank, annex it to the entity, and pave the way for building a synagogue on the ruins of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque. Just as the resistance in Gaza refuses to surrender to the occupation, it will likewise not submit to the occupation in the West Bank, where Tel Aviv “seeks to build the illusion of a Talmudic” regime.

Early last week, Israel’s far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir provocatively announced his intention to build a synagogue at the Al-Asqa Mosque compound in the occupied Old City of al-Quds, drawing condemnations from all over the Islamic world.

It was the first time for the Israeli minister to openly speak about building a synagogue inside the complex, strengthening the narrative that the Muslim holy site and Palestinian national symbol is under threat from the occupying regime.

“Netanyahu and members of his” cabinet’s “insistence on portraying the West Bank as part of the entity's map, both before and after the Al-Aqsa Flood battle, is evidence that the aggression on the West Bank is part of a premeditated plan that the entity’s” cabinet “seeks to implement and make a reality. It has become clear that this plan involves making demographic changes in the West Bank, threatening the security of the region, particularly Jordan and the [Persian] Gulf states,” the Islamic Jihad stated.

Israel launched the ongoing war on the besieged Gaza Strip on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime's decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.

The movement also said Netanyahu’s “stubborn stance” on repeatedly rejecting a lasting ceasefire in Gaza “is an obvious attempt to buy time and gamble on changes within the United States to reoccupy the Gaza Strip and advance the plan to seize the West Bank to establish a state for those obsessed with Talmudic myths.”

The regime’s bloody onslaught on Gaza has so far killed over 40,780 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured more than 93,000 others. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under rubble.

“We call on the Palestinian Authority to reconsider its positions before it loses the last remnants of the illusion of sovereignty over violated areas while continuing to bet on an international community and an Arab stance that have proven to be impotent and complicit,” the Islamic Jihad said in its statement.

Islamic Jihad: Resistance to last until Israel’s expulsion

The Islamic Jihad says the Israeli regime’s escalation in the occupied West Bank will only further embolden the resistance in its endeavor to liberate the Palestinian territories.

According to Palestinian health officials, more than 680 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 5,400 others injured by Israeli forces in the West Bank since the outbreak of the war on Gaza.

The Islamic Jihad also warned Arab countries against normalization of relations with the Israeli regime, urging them “to recognize the true nature of the Zionist project and its goals.”

“This racist usurping entity seeks land and does not value all the peace rhetoric, except to the extent that it provides time to fracture the Arab and Muslim front to complete its domination of the region and its peoples,” it added.

Since Israel unleashed the current brutal war on Gaza, casualties have been rising in the West Bank as a result of intensified near-daily Israeli raids into villages and cities in the occupied territories.

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