ShareGAZA/BEIRUT: Hamas’ armed wing vowed on Monday, the anniversary of the group’s Oct 7 attack on the Zionist entity, to keep fighting what it described as a “long war of attrition”. “We choose to keep up the fight in a long war of attrition, one that is painful and costly for the enemy,” said Abu Obeida, spokesman of the militant group’s armed wing.
He also warned in a statement broadcast on Al Jazeera that scores of people taken captive into Gaza on Oct 7 last year were enduring a “very difficult” situation. He said the “psychological and health condition of the remaining hostages has become very difficult”.
Hamas’ attack on Oct 7 last year took the Zionist entity back to “square zero”, a senior Hamas official said on Monday. “Al-Aqsa flood returned the occupation to square zero and threatened its existence,” Khaled Meshaal, the former head of Hamas, said on the Al Arabiya TV station, using the group’s name for the attack. Meshaal said last year’s Oct 7 attack was “a natural response to the occupation and its accelerating plans for settlement, siege and aggression against Al-Aqsa,” referring to the flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City.
He also accused the Zionist entity of threatening Egypt and Jordan, despite long-standing peace agreements between the countries, saying “the enemy wants everyone in the region to be subject to him and he does this even with countries that do not fight him”. He said the Zionist entity “attacks Arab and Islamic national security everywhere”.
“The crossing of the glorious 7th of October shattered the illusions the enemy had created for itself, convincing the world and the region of its supposed superiority and capabilities,” Qatar-based Hamas member Khalil Al-Hayya said in a video statement on Sunday. Hayya said a year after the Oct 7 attack, “all of Palestine, particularly Gaza, and our Palestinian people are writing a new history with their resistance, blood and steadfastness”.
The Hamas member, who has emerged as the Islamist group’s public face following the killing of its former leader Ismail Haniyeh in July, said Gazans had remained “resilient to all attempts at displacement... despite the kinds of torture and terrorism you have endured, and the horrific genocide and daily massacre”.
Hayya, who has worked as Hamas’ lead negotiator in talks since the end of July, reiterated Hamas’ position that the Zionist entity had obstructed a truce in Gaza. “What we rejected yesterday, we will not accept tomorrow, and what the occupation failed to impose by force, it will not take at the negotiating table,” he said.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah on Monday also vowed to keep up the fight against Zionist “aggression”. Hezbollah and the Lebanese have paid a “heavy price” for the group’s decision to open a “support front” for Gaza on October 8, but “we are confident... in the ability of our resistance to oppose the (Zionist) aggression”, it said in a statement, calling the Zionist entity a “cancerous gland that must be eliminated, no matter how long it takes”.
Iran on Monday praised Hamas’ Oct 7 attack as a decisive moment for Palestinians. “The operation on October 7, 2023... was a turning point in the history of the legitimate struggle of the Palestinian people against the occupation and oppression of the Zionist regime,” Iran’s foreign ministry said. It described the attack as a release of “the Palestinian people’s pent-up historic anger against eight decades of occupation, murder and genocide”.
The statement also accused the Zionist entity’s allies of supporting these actions. “Supporters of the occupying regime, especially the United States, have been complicit in the crimes of this regime” against Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and Yemenis, it said. It added that they “must be held accountable for supplying weapons and supporting the Zionist regime”.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday vowed the Zionist entity would pay a price for the genocide in Gaza as he marked the first anniversary of the war. “It should not be forgotten that (the Zionist entity) will sooner or later pay the price for this genocide that it has been carrying out for a year and is still continuing,” he said on X.
A vocal advocate of the Palestinian cause, including Hamas, Erdogan has often attacked the Zionist entity, branding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the “butcher of Gaza” and comparing him to Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler. “Just as Hitler was stopped by an alliance of humanity, Netanyahu and his murder network will be stopped in the same way,” Erdogan said. “A world in which no account is held for the Gaza genocide will never find peace.”
The Turkish leader, who often lauded Hamas as freedom fighters, said what has been massacred before the eyes of the entire world for exactly one year “is actually all of humanity, and all of humanity’s hopes for the future”. Erdogan also criticized the international system’s failure to stop the conflict in Gaza and now in Lebanon and said: “(The Zionist entity’s) long-standing policy of genocide, occupation and invasion must now come to an end.”
The Zionist entity stepped up its air and ground offensive in Gaza with more attacks on Hamas fighters and command posts on Monday. Hamas said it struck Tel Aviv with a missile salvo, setting off sirens in the Zionist entity. The rocket volley signaled Hamas enduring ability to hit back despite a protracted Zionist military campaign that has seriously degraded its combat capacities, a year after the shock cross-border Hamas incursion into the Zionist entity. Hamas’ smaller ally Islamic Jihad said it hit Sderot, Nir Am and other Zionist towns near Gaza with rockets.
On Monday, Zionist tanks advanced into Jabalia, the largest of Gaza Strip’s eight historic urban refugee camps, after encircling it, residents said. Soon after the rocket volley, the Zionist military expanded evacuation orders in Jabalia to cover areas in the northern towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya. Residents said Zionist forces pounded Jabalia from the air and the ground, and medics said several Palestinians had been killed, with rescuers unable to reach some of the victims. Later on Monday, Palestinian medics said a Zionist airstrike killed five Palestinians to the west of Jabalia.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah fired rockets at Haifa on Monday as Zionist forces looked poised to expand ground raids into south Lebanon. Hezbollah said it targeted a military base south of Haifa with “Fadi 1” missiles and launched another strike on Tiberias, 65 km away. Hezbollah said it targeted areas north of Haifa in a second salvo of missiles later in the day. The Zionist military said around 135 projectiles had entered Zionist territory on Monday.
The military said the air force was carrying out extensive bombings of Hezbollah targets in south Lebanon, and that two Zionist soldiers were killed in border-area combat, taking the military death toll inside Lebanon so far to 11. It said it also carried out a targeted strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where a thick plume of smoke could be seen. Lebanon’s health ministry said 10 firefighters were killed in a Zionist airstrike on a municipal building in the border-area town of Bint Jbeil, and that other aerial attacks on Sunday killed 22 people in a swathe of southern and eastern towns. – Agencies
