WEST BANK (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime has deployed missile systems to the center of occupied territories for fear of a possible retaliatory attack, two weeks after the regime’s warplanes bombed Gaza and killed a dozen members of Palestinian resistance movements there.
The Zionist regime’s military did not elaborate on where the so-called Iron Dome batteries had exactly been installed.
This is the first time such a war-like posture has been adopted by the Tel Aviv regime since 2014, when the occupying regime launched a bloody 50-day war on the blockaded Gaza Strip.
In late October, the Zionist regime’s fighter jets destroyed a lifeline tunnel in the southern part of the besieged Gaza Strip, killing 10 members of the Gaza-based Islamic Jihad resistance movement and two other fighters with the fellow Hamas resistance group.
In a video posted on YouTube on Saturday, Zionist Major General Yoav Mordechai warned Islamic Jihad that any retaliatory attack by the group "will be met with a powerful and determined Israeli response, not only against the Jihad, but also against Hamas.”
A day later, the resistance movement said in a statement on Sunday it would not back down on its "right to respond to any aggression, including our right to respond to the crime of aggression on the resistance tunnel.”
The Zionist regime’s "threats to target the movement’s leadership is a declaration of war, which we will confront,” the statement read.
In yet another measure against Islamic Jihad, the regime arrested one of its senior leaders, identified as Tareq Qadaan, near the city of Jenin in the northern part of the occupied West Bank.
Israel claims that resistance fighters use the Gaza underground tunnels to stockpile weapons and infiltrate into the occupied lands.
They, however, say the tunnels are needed to transfer essential supplies, including food and fuel, into the Palestinian territory, which has been under a crippling siege by the regime for over a decade.
The blockade has caused a decline in living standards as well as unprecedented unemployment and poverty.
The fresh Zionist campaign of confrontation comes as Palestinian factions Fatah, based in Ramallah, and Hamas, which used to run the Gaza Strip, have reached a national unity deal designed to bridge the political rift between them and to allow Fatah to govern the coastal enclave.