Jabalia Steadfast in Face of Israeli Bombs

With the intensification of the Israeli bombing of northern Gaza and with a siege of more than 80 days now, especially of Jabalia, its camp and Beit Lahia, the resistance is using all available tools to counter the Israeli aggression despite  turning north Gaza into an eyesore of destruction and not a place for survival.

The resistance continues to show unparalleled bravery standing up Israeli soldiers who can be seen carrying their dead and wounded on a daily basis.

The Jabalia camp, one of the largest refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, reflects, with its history and reality, a miniature image of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Analysts point out the operations launched from Jabalia reflect the roots of the Palestinian struggle rooted in the camps since the Nakba in 1948.

“We are the ones who used to chase the Israeli patrol in our camp here (Jabalia) with the sticks”… This was one of the expressions used by martyr leader Nizar Rayyan inside the Jabalia camp. He was martyred in the first wars that the resistance fought with the Israeli occupation forces in 2008-2009, showing the bravery of the people of Jabalia and their legendary steadfastness in confronting the occupier.

 “Just as we rubbed your noses in Ashdod, we will rub your noses in Jabalia,” Rayyan used to say.

While the 444 days of this rabid war on Gaza Strip should have been enough to end the resistance – according to Israeli and American thinking – the Al-Qassam and Al-Quds Brigades fighters in Jabalia say this is wishful thinking even if thousands of Mujahideens are killed, and the weapons run out as the recent stabbing operations show. These operations shouldn’t be interperated to mean as some suggest that weapons are running out for the enemy’s daily losses are not decreasing while the capabilities of the resistance are rising.

The Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas military wing, announced Sunday, it targeted nine soldiers inside a house with a “TBG” shell west of Jabalia camp, confirming they have either been killed and/or wounded whilst stating it destroyed an Israeli troop carrier with a “commando” explosive device in the Al-Alami area in the center of Jabalia camp.

The brigades added that “a Zionist officer was sniped in Abu Al-Aish Street in the center of Jabalia camp, north of the Strip,” and said it targeted a second Israeli troop carrier with a “commando” explosive device west of Beit Lahia, north of the Strip.

As well last Friday, the Al-Qassam Brigades announced it carried out a complex operation in Jabalia camp; where one of its fighters advanced towards an Israeli sniper and his assistant, and stabbed them to death, adding the fighter wore the uniform of one of the dead, and an hour after the operation, he advanced towards an Israeli force of six individuals, and blew himself up with an explosive belt, killing and wounding its members.

Last Saturday, Al-Qassam Brigades announced on its Telegram channel its fighters carried out a complex operation, stabbing three Israeli soldiers to death, seizing their personal weapons, then storming a house where a foot force had taken cover, killing two of its soldiers at the house gate.

On Sunday, the Al Jihad Al-Quds Brigades stated that one of its heroic martyrs stormed a Zionist troop carrier and carried out a special operation by detonating a suicide bomb among the soldiers who were at the entrance to the Al-Awda Towers in Ezbet Beit Hanoun.

Military analyst Major-General Fayez Al-Duwairi says “zero distance” is a golden opportunity for resistance fighters in their confrontation with the occupation forces, given the big difference between the equipment of the Israeli army with its high capabilities, and the weapons made by al- mujahideen locally.

He added the more the intensity of the ground aggression and Israeli incursions into the Gaza Strip areas increases, the greater the resistance’s opportunity to engage directly with enemy forces.

Since the start of the Battle of Al-Aqsa Flood, the resistance fighters have shown the most prominent of their weapons to target the Israeli enemy, including Al-Yassin 105 shells, tandem shells, sniper weapons, Shawaaz bombs and machine guns according to the Palestine Information Center.

However, the use of the stabbing weapon and explosive belts  which emerged in recent days to carry out martyrdom operations, indicates that the weapons used by the resistance are no longer as accessible as they were in the past, due to the tight siege imposed by the occupation, and the intensity of the operations carried out by the resistance fighters, which has led to the depletion of the battalions’ weapons stockpile.

The heroic operations carried out by the resistance fighters in northern Gaza over the past 80 days have resulted in the killing of more than 70 soldiers and officers in the occupation forces, in the Jabalia camp and camp alone, including the bombing of more than 100 military vehicles, 17 sniper operations, and 26 clashes with a foot force.

In a Yedioth Ahronoth interview with an Israeli officer he said the confrontation in northern Gaza these days is through the alleys, face to face with Palestinian fighters who do not fear death and refuse to be arrested.

Major-General Mohammed Al-Samadi believes that the significance of the stabbing operations and martyrdom operations in Jabalia confirms that the resistance is cohesive and strong, and adapts according to combat developments, and carries out hit-and-run operations, and carries out operations through small groups, including the lone wolf operations carried out by one of the mujahideen against the occupation forces, causing casualties and injuries in their ranks.

Al-Samadi added in an interview with Al Jazeera the resistance in northern Gaza has killed 17 soldiers through sniper operations, and that one fighter in the resistance factions can kill a group of individuals in the occupation forces, indicating that the occupation suffers from weak morale among its fighters, and also suffers from an intelligence failure in knowing the resistance’s tactics.

CrossFireArabia

CrossFireArabia

Dr. Marwan Asmar holds a PhD from Leeds University and is a freelance writer specializing on the Middle East. He has worked as a journalist since the early 1990s in Jordan and the Gulf countries, and been widely published, including at Albawaba, Gulf News, Al Ghad, World Press Review and others.

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Profile: Meet ‘Prince of Shadows’ Abdullah Barghouti

Nicknamed “the Prince of Shadows” Abdullah Barghouti is the Palestinian political prisoner with the most number of life sentences ever given to a single detainee.

A former leader of the Hamas’ al-Qassam brigade’s armed wing, in the West Bank, he now appears to be on the verge of release in the Hamas-Israel prisoner exchange. 

Born in Kuwait in 1972, Abdullah Barghouti grew up outside of occupied Palestine, despite his family having originated from the village of Beit Rima, located near Ramallah. Barghouti attended school, up until high school in Kuwait.

Upon the eruption of the first Intifada in the occupied Palestinian territories, in 1987, Barghouti recounted in his memoir that the uprising had inspired him to seek revenge against the occupiers, especially after Israeli forces murdered one of his cousins and youngest uncle. “Simply put, they threw stones at the Zionist occupation forces that were wreaking havoc, so they were shot and martyred” he stated.

During the first Gulf War (1990-1991), Abdullah Barghouti was reportedly arrested for around a month after being accused of participating in the fight against US forces, later being released after the war. Prior to this, Barghouti had decided to pursue the combat sport of Judo and was trained by a man named Munir Samik who was also Palestinian.

Samik once asked Barghouti: “Aren’t you Palestinian? Don’t you want to liberate your country? If you use it against all those who occupied your homeland, there in Palestine, use what you learned here.” Inspired to make himself physically strong and capable of fighting Israel, he then began training in the use of firearms and explosives in the Kuwaiti desert. During the war, Barghouti’s family was forced to flee to Jordan.

When he traveled to live in Amman, Jordan, he would finish high school there but due to his family being too poor to afford University, so he would borrow money from a relative in order to open up a mechanic shop, continuing to practice Judo as a hobby. However, he wasn’t able to earn enough money to keep his business afloat and pay back his relatives and decided to move abroad in order to pursue higher education instead. 

A friend of Barghouti had recommended he apply for a visa program to travel to South Korea, which ended up leading him there in pursuit of an education. When he arrived, he had no money and little but the clothes on his back.

Barghouti walked from the airport to a location that was supposed to help him secure an education; his journey would take three days during which he went without eating. He recalled that he drank water from public parks until reaching the address he had been given, finding out that it was a wood-cutting factory. 

So, without any money or prospects, he ended up working at the factory for 45 days without having money to buy food, eating only from what the factory would supply him.

In 1991, after a few months in the wood-cutting factory, he moved to work in a mechanical factory and studied in parallel with his work at an engineering institute, specializing in electromechanics. This was also the time during which he would meet his wife, who was of Korean origin.

However, his passion for seeking the liberation of Palestine through armed struggle would not perish while he lived in South Korea, as he would routinely go deep into the forest and practice making improvised explosive devices and refining his craft. In 1998 he would then return to Amman with his wife, before deciding to divorce her due to his desire to have children.

Around this time he started becoming more religious, moved to Jerusalem and then the West Bank, married a Palestinian wife, and settled down in his family’s village of Beit Rima. He later had two daughters, Safaa and Tala, and a son called Osama.

It just so happened that in 2001, Beit Rima would be the first area in the West Bank that would experience a full-scale military invasion during the Second Intifada. Israeli forces deployed tanks, attack helicopters, and a huge military force to the village.

Abdullah Barghouti joined the Qassam Brigades in 2001, seeking out his cousin Bilal Barghouti in order to share his expertise in bomb-making.

After his cousin, who is currently serving 16 life sentences in Israeli military prison, witnessed how skilled he was at engineering explosives, he told his superiors in the Hamas military wing and Abdullah Barghouti would begin military training in the Nablus area, going on to become a commander of the Qassam Brigades in the West Bank.

This entire time, almost nobody close to him knew of his secret ambition to seek revenge against Israel and his bomb-making skills. He would later go on to participate in the manufacturing of explosives that killed 66 Israelis and injured over 500.

When he was eventually tracked down in 2003 and arrested by the Israeli occupation forces, he was interrogated and tortured for over five months, before being handed 67 life sentences, amounting to 5,200 years in prison. In later interviews recorded with Barghouti from inside an Israeli prison, he would confidently state that one day interviewers would come to meet him while he sits inside a hot tub in Ramallah.

If he is to be released during the upcoming Hamas-Israel prisoner exchange, it is likely that Israel will request his deportation outside of occupied Palestine. It is speculated that Barghouti could be useful to Hamas in developing its influence in the armed struggle inside the West Bank, which is currently dominated by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Fatah-aligned fighters.

(The Palestine Chronicle)

– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

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After 39 Years Israel Frees ‘Dean of Palestinian Prisoners’

After 39 years of mistreatment and retaliation in Israeli jails, Mohammed Al-Tous, the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner, was released on Saturday as part of the second batch under phase one of the Jan. 19 ceasefire agreement and prisoner exchange deal.

Al-Tous, nicknamed the “dean of Palestinian Prisoners,” hails from the village of Jab’a in Bethlehem, in the southern occupied West Bank. He has spent 39 years in Israeli prisons since his arrest in 1985.

Who is the dean of Palestinian Prisoners?

Mohammed Ahmed Abdul-Hamid Al-Tous, 69, is the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli detention. He was arrested in October 1985 and sentenced to life in prison for leading a group in carrying out military operations against Israeli military targets. He sustained severe injuries during his arrest.

Over the years, Al-Tous endured various forms of mistreatment and retaliation. In addition to the serious injuries he suffered during his arrest from Israeli gunfire and enduring lengthy and harsh interrogations, the Israeli forces demolished his family home three times.

Israel repeatedly refused to release Al-Tous in all prisoner exchange deals and release initiatives during his incarceration, including a group of veteran prisoners in 2014, in which he was listed, but Israel refused to release.

A year later, his wife’s health deteriorated, and she fell into a coma for a full year before passing away in 2015, without Al-Tous being able to bid her farewell.

Al-Tous is among the veteran prisoners detained before the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, a group that now numbers 21 prisoners following last year’s death of Walid Daqqa.

This group is joined by 11 re-arrested prisoners from the Gilad Shalit exchange deal of 2011, who had been imprisoned before the Oslo Accords, released in 2011, and then re-arrested in 2014, most notably Nael Barghouthi.

Prisoner exchange

Palestinian resistance group Hamas earlier Saturday handed over four female Israeli soldiers under a Gaza ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement with Israel.

Some 200 Palestinian prisoners were also released on Saturday in exchange for the four freed Israeli soldiers.

Television footage showed the arrival of 114 prisoners to the West Bank city of Ramallah from the Ofer Military Prison aboard three International Red Cross buses.

Sixteen prisoners, accompanied by Red Cross representatives, also arrived at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, to the warm welcome of thousands.

Egypt’s state-affiliated Al-Qahera News channel also reported that two buses carrying 70 freed Palestinian prisoners arrived in Egypt under the Gaza ceasefire agreement.

The Prisoners’ Media Office said early Saturday that the freed prisoners include 121 who had been serving life sentences and 79 with lengthy sentences.

It added that 70 of those serving life sentences will be sent outside the Palestinian territories.

Under phase one of the Gaza ceasefire, Israel is now set to withdraw from the Netzarim Corridor area that separates northern Gaza from its south, allowing displaced Palestinians to return to northern Gaza.

Ceasefire seeking permanent truce

The first six-week phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement took effect on Jan. 19, suspending Israel’s genocidal war that has killed over 47,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and injured more than 111,000 since Oct. 7, 2023.

On day one of the ceasefire, Israel released 90 Palestinian detainees in return for three Israeli captives set free by Hamas.

The three-phase ceasefire agreement includes a prisoner exchange and sustained calm, aiming for a permanent truce and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza according to Anadolu.

The Israeli onslaught has left more than 11,000 people missing, with widespread destruction and a humanitarian crisis that has claimed the lives of untold numbers of elderly people, women, and children.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants last November for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

​​​​​​​Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.

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