Hamas, Islamic Jihad Call for Popular Uprising After Deadly Israeli Settler Attack on West Bank Village

Friday, 16 August 2024 10:59 AM

Hundreds of Israeli settlers, armed with assault rifles and Molotov cocktails, attack the Palestinian village of Jit, east of Qalqilia in the West Bank.

The Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad resistance groups have condemned an attack by illegal Israeli settlers on the village of Jit in the northern West Bank, where they killed a Palestinian and set fire to homes and cars belonging to other residents.

In a statement on Friday, Hamas called for a popular uprising against the gangs of settlers.

“We mourn the heroic martyr Rashid Mahmoud Sada, who was killed by settler militias in the village of Jit. We affirm that this pure blood will not go in vain and will be a curse upon the occupying regime,” the statement read.

Earlier, Abdel Rahman Shadid, a Hamas leader, had stated that “The Nazi occupation's aggression through its armed illegal settlers on the village of Jit east of Qalqilya this evening, along with the burning and abuse, is part of a series of crimes by the occupation in the West Bank.”

Shadid called on Palestinians in the West Bank “to further rise up against the occupation and its settlers and to confront their brutal attacks by all possible means.”

For its part, the Islamic Jihad resistance movement also condemned the attack by illegal Israeli settlers on the village of Jit, terming it a declaration of war on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

“The occupation army's siege of the village during the attack is reminiscent of the massacres carried out by the Stern, Irgun, and Haganah gangs, among others, in 1948, with the aim of displacing our people from their land.

“The participation of the occupation army in securing protection for these crimes proves that what is being implemented is an official plan under the sponsorship of war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu,” the Gaza-based group said in a statement.

The Islamic Jihad movement also urged all Palestinian residents of the West Bank to confront settler gangs and their crimes in defense of the occupied territories and the Palestinian nation.

Additionally, the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement decried the attack by illegal Israeli settlers on the Palestinian village of Jit as an extension of the genocidal war led by the fascist Zionist entity against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

“This brutal aggression, supported by the criminals [Israel's so-called national security minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir and [prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, where settlers besieged the village, burned properties, and shot at unarmed citizens, represents a dangerous escalation in the Zionist aggression against our people. It must be met with a qualitative escalation in resistance and confrontation,” it said in a statement.

“We call upon the masses of our people in the cities and villages of the West Bank for a wide-scale uprising and comprehensive intifada to forcefully confront the crimes of Zionists, and thwart their criminal plans aimed at eradication of the Palestinian presence and displacement of our people,” it added.

On Thursday evening, more than 100 illegal Israeli settlers attacked Jit, killed a Palestinian citizen and seriously injured another.

They set fire to four homes and six vehicles owned by Palestinians during the incursion.

Since Israel unleashed a war on the besieged Gaza Strip in early October 2023, 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.

At least 623 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, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

At least 40,005 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have also been killed in the Israeli genocidal war against the Gaza Strip during the past 10 months.