Military and strategic expert Nidal Abu Zeid said the scenes of the handing over of the three Israeli prisoners, Saturday, were more disciplined and organized and carried many messages that the Palestinian resistance wanted to send to the Israeli occupation as part of the superiority it achieved in the battle of image and media.
Abu Zeid added to Jordan 24 the handover took place in two locations in the north and center of the Gaza Strip, which indicates the continuing strength of leadership and control of the resistance even after Hamas announced the martyrdom of seven of the first-rank leaders of the Qassam Brigades.
He pointed out this indicated that the Palestinian resistance also succeeded in overcoming the crisis of its organizational structure as well as in replacing its leaders who were killed in Israel.
Abu Zeid pointed out the black jeep that appeared during the handover of the two prisoners in Khan Yunis is one of the occupation army vehicles the resistance seized during its military operations there. This is in addition to the scenes of weapons carried by the resistance fighters during the handover, such as the Uzi and Scorpion, which are weapons of the elite units of the Israeli occupation forces.
He explained the place of handover in Khan Younis and the background pictures of leaders Mohammed Deif, the Hamas military chief and Rafeh Salama on the platform, shows the symbolism of the city, as the birthplace of Deif and leader Salama who led the Khan Younis Brigade, and both were martyred in an operation by the Israeli occupation in Al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis.
This is in addition to the symbolism of handing over one of the prisoners who holds American citizenship in the Gaza port near the area where the American side tried to establish the sea pier but miserably failed and ended in losing millions of dollars.
Abu Zeid pointed out the resistance is still superior in the battle of the image and the media it broadcasts through scenes of handing over prisoners within messages related to the capabilities of the resistance and decoding some of the symbols of the signals through which it wants to prove its capabilities and the fact it is able to continue, whether through the diplomatic dimension and negotiations or a return to the military operational dimension.
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.
The Qassam Brigades succeeded not only in winning the war and achieving victory in Gaza, but also in dealing fatal blows to Israeli morale, when they surprised the entire world, not just Israel, by organizing a military parade for hundreds of their fighters who emerged from the rubble, and/or heart of tunnels in their extremely elegant green clothes with their personal weapons, in a startling move, shedding light on their strength, despite Netanyahu’s 15 months of carnage. Brigade fighters stood steadfast, fighting, and sniping Israeli soldiers like birds and rabbits, despite the deceptions by their political and military leaders.
***
The smiling faces of the three Israeli female prisoners released in the first batch of the exchange according to the first phase of the ceasefire agreement were striking. The three young women emerged as if they had just returned from a concert, in good health, and in high spirits as if they were staying in a five-star hotel. It was a wonderful and very smart gesture for their guards to present symbolic gifts before they left the Strip in a Red Cross car.
These are the terrorists according to US and European specifics, setting an example of humanity, while the diplomatic envoys of Western civilization rape prisoners and treat them in a Nazi-like manner. The most honest example is the mujahida Khalida Jarrar and the painful state she appeared in after her release.
The fire of resistance ignites in the West Bank, suicide operations expand, and the dead among the occupation forces rises on the first days of the ceasefire to confirm that jihad is continuing in parallel and in conjunction with the exchange of prisoners.
The one who forced Netanyahu to drink the cup of defeat is not Trump, but the heroes of the Qassam Brigades, Al-Quds Brigades, and the Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, who exhausted the Israeli army with heavy losses among its brigades and battalions, in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and southern Lebanon.
Netanyahu stands defeated, not achieving any of his goals, neither eliminating the resistance movements in Gaza, nor with displacing the people of the Strip and replacing them with Israeli settlers.
As such we do not rule out the fact that he may violate the ceasefire in the coming days, and before the end of its first phase, in the hope of remaining in power. But no matter, the goals he failed to achieve over the course of 15 months of extermination and ethnic cleansing will not be achieved if he returns to war again but legitimize many retaliatory reactions from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Yemen, and perhaps soon from Lebanon and Iraq.
***
Our people in the Gaza Strip celebrate and sing for joys of victory achieved by the resistance. Perhaps the return of the symbolic Abu Obeida after months of absence, congratulating all on victory and ignoring all Arab leaders except Yemen whilst affirming the readiness of the Qassam to return to fighting is a confirmation of the strength and steadfastness of the resistance, and its high capabilities to manage war, manage negotiations, and psychological warfare.
Thus we assert that the liberation of Palestine, all of Palestine, and the restoration of dignity to the Arabs and Muslims, has become imminent and it is only a matter of time…
This editorial by Al Rai Al Youm’s Chief Editor Mr Abdel Bari Atwan has been reproduced from Arabic
After the private dinner hosted by Donald Trump “in honor” of Mrs. Sara Netanyahu, the US President-elect immediately threatened to set the Middle East on fire if the Israeli prisoners in the Gaza Strip tunnels, guarded by the Qassam Brigades and the Al-Quds Brigades, were not released before his return to the White House on 20 January 2025.
Trump went further when he threatened the Palestinian resistance factions with paying a heavy price if the hostages were not released, and directed his threats specifically at the leaders of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements.
In his first term as US President, he made many similar threats, such as destroying North Korea, subjugating China, forcing Mexico to pay the bill for the border wall to keep out immigrants, and turning Iran into another Hiroshima if it responded to the assassination of the martyrs, Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
Donald Trump will WW3 better than the likes of anyone in the world has ever seen in the history of all wars and Armageddons. It'll be yuge. Nobody will have ever seen obliteration of all mankind and life on earth on such a scale before. pic.twitter.com/mJprkpBGqZ
— Mannie Quinn & The Mighty Hornets🐝 (@MannieMighty1) December 2, 2024
Trump – an “unruly” professional liar – did not dare to carry out any of these threats, and perhaps the only threat he carried out was withdrawing from the nuclear agreement with Iran in 2017, which backfired and came as a major gift to Iran it never dreamed of, which since developed, theoretically and practically, into an unofficially declared nuclear state.
We would like to tell Trump his threats will not move a hair on the head of the smallest hungry or injured Palestinian infant in the steadfast and heroic Gaza Strip.
If his partner [Netanyahu] in the extermination war and ethnic cleansing and who used all kinds of mass destruction weapons to bomb Gaza – executed more than 45,000 martyrs, three-quarters of whom, children and women, and destroyed 95 percent of their homes – did not succeed in releasing these Israeli prisoners, despite advanced US intelligence, what does Trump have that is stronger and more effective than that? Hitting the Gaza Strip with a nuclear bomb, as his criminal friend Senator Lindsey Graham suggests?!
The heroic Al-Qassam Brigades and Al-Quds Brigades have not submitted to all this bloody Israeli pressure and did not release the prisoners throughout the past 14 months. All the pressure and rounds of negotiations sponsored by America failed, unfortunately with Arab collusion; the USA wanted to trap Hamas and Jihad which firmly stuck to their conditions, and did not give up a single inch.
So what more can the reckless Trump do?
We need to remind Trump and draw his attention to a set of points he must have forgotten about in the midst of his euphoria on his victory over his naive and foolish opponent Kamala Harris:
First, the resistance in Gaza is still strong, ongoing, and inflicting huge and humiliating losses on the Israeli enemy and its forces, and from zero-distance, which reflects the heroism and courage of its men. Not a single mujahid surrendered, all fought until martyrdom.
Second, there is not a single American aircraft carrier now in the Middle East and its seas, whether it is red, white or Arab, due to the blessed Yemeni missiles. It is enough to point out the attack with naval ballistic missiles that hit the carrier Abraham Lincoln a few days ago, which escaped with heavy casualties and damaged three destroyers and other ships. The day before yesterday, a Yemeni hypersonic missile struck a military base in the heart of occupied Jaffa.
Third, the brave and courageous Trump did not dare respond to the Iranian missile that shot down his largest drone in the Gulf, the “RQ-4 Global Hawk” in 2019 (costing $300 million) after it deviated from its course several meters inside Iranian territory.
Fourth, great America withdrew from Afghanistan, defeated and humiliated, a few months after Biden took power from you. We all witnessed, and the whole world at that, the great escape of American forces in a way that reflects the height of humiliation.
Trump no longer frightens anyone, and in his new version he did not dare utter a single word of criticism at Russian President Vladimir Putin, who defeated his country on the plains and coasts of Ukraine, and cut off and annexed more than 20 percent of its “territory”.
Trump did not dare utter the name of China, which was his number one enemy in his first term, and let us not forget in this haste to touch on North Korea and its leader Kim Jong-un, who humiliated and degraded him, and brought him to Hanoi and Singapore in two summit meetings, from which he returned to Washington with his head bowed.
Perhaps only some Arabs who were forced to accept the humiliating normalization and his “Deal of the Century” during his first term will be afraid of Trump and his threats. But times have changed, and there is now a major superpower called the “Axis of Resistance” with a mighty head and long, deadly arms.
Above all, there is the new, powerful BRICS organization, which will not end Trump’s second term in the White House (four years) until the US dollar exhales most of its last breath. The days lie ahead, Mr. Trump!
This is a translated piece from Arabic by Mr Abdel Bari Atwan, chief editor of Al Raialyoum website and reprinted on www.crossfirearabia.com.
Four Israeli soldiers were killed in an ambush set up by the resistance in the south of the Gaza Strip. Also the resistance also carried out a qualitative operation against the Israeli occupation forces in the southern Gaza and bombed the sorrounding Israeli towns.
The Israeli media reported that four Israeli soldiers were killed in an ambush set up by the Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military wing in the southern city of Rafah Tuesday afternoon.
As well al Jihad Quds Brigades stated it “destroyed a Zionist Merkava tank east of Rafah by detonating a highly explosive barrel bomb,” and published scenes of its shelling of the cities of Ashkelon and Sderot, north of the Gaza envelope, with a barrage of rockets according to Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, Hamas stated the occupation army committed a new massacre “by carrying out a brutal and intensive shelling that included a residential area crowded with residents east of the Al-Bureij camp, which led to the destruction of a number of homes over the heads of their residents and the deaths and injuries of dozens.”
The Gaza Ministry of Health also announced that the occupation forces committed, in the past 24 hours, three massacres in the enclave, of which 26 martyrs and 84 wounded arrived at hospitals, bringing the number of victims, since the beginning of the Israeli war on Gaza to 41,252 martyrs and 95,497 wounded.
In turn, Al Jazeera reported the martyrdom of journalist Mohammed Abu Shawqa in a bombing that targeted his home in Al-Bureij camp, and the recovery of the body of a martyr from the Wadi Gaza area, north of Al-Nuseirat camp, also in the central Strip.
Hamas confirmed “these heinous and repeated crimes show that the Israeli army insist on its extermination war and the direct and deliberate targeting of defenseless civilians, amidst reprehensible global silence and a state of complete paralysis of the international system.”
It stressed “these ongoing massacres against the people of Gaza, which are being committed with the complicity and support of the US administration and western capitals, will not weaken the resolve and steadfastness of our Palestinian people or succeed in subduing their resistance, or bring the fascist Zionist clique closer to achieving the goals of its brutal aggression.”
With significant US support, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7, 2023, which has left more than 136,000 martyrs and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 10,000 missing, amid massive destruction and deadly famine.
In disregard of the international community, Israel continues this war, ignoring the UN Security Council resolution to stop it immediately, and the orders of the International Court of Justice to take measures to prevent acts of genocide and improve the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza.
CrossFireArabia
