USPCN Statement on Unified Palestinian Resistance

USPCN Statement on Unified Palestinian Resistance attacking Israeli military outposts and illegal settlements in response to months of Israeli assaults on Palestinian civilians.

For Immediate Release: Saturday, October 7th, 2023

The unified Palestinian Resistance – consisting of all the different Palestinian political and resistance factions – is responding right now to decades of apartheid Israel’s brutality and violations of Palestinian national and human rights. The Resistance is firing rockets at military targets and engaging Israeli soldiers in armed combat just outside the besieged Gaza Strip and in surrounding illegal Israeli settlements. 

There are numerous news reports of multiple Israeli casualties, and confirmation (from Israeli news sources) that at least 35 Israeli soldiers and / or settlers have been taken captive and now held alive in Gaza. 

These self-defense operations – called Al-Aqsa Flood by the Resistance – have been launched in response to over 100 years of zionist settler-colonialism; 56 years of illegal military occupation; and at least two years of unrelenting terrorism from Israeli settlers, attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque and Palestinian churches in Jerusalem, and repeated settler and military invasions of Palestinian cities, villages, and refugee camps across 1948 Palestine, Jerusalem, and the West Bank, especially in Jenin Refugee Camp and Nablus. 

In this same recent period, the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Masafer Yatta have seen dozens of Palestinian families ethnically cleansed and expelled by the Israeli government and military, and of course, Gaza remains under a 17-year-long criminal siege that has devastated the civic, health, and economic conditions of all the Palestinians there.

The UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process reported that Israel killed close to 200 Palestinians in 2022, and that it was the deadliest year in the West Bank since 2004. This year, over 200 additional Palestinians have already been killed by the Israelis, including more than 30 children. 

“Palestinians have an internationally-recognized right to resist illegal military occupation, and today’s attacks from the Palestinian Resistance should be understood as a legitimate response to unending violence from Israel’s extreme right-wing, racist, white supremacist, zionist government and settler movement,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, the National Chair of USPCN. “The Resistance has been warning Israel and its U.S. and Western European patrons to end their attacks on our people, but now we have no choice but to defend ourselves, because the Israeli military and racist settlers have been attacking and killing with impunity, and must and will be stopped! We will win our liberation and Return!”

#Palestine #Gaza #AlAqsaFlood 

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