WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Zionist troops have arrested several Palestinians and wounded many others on the second night of a crackdown on crowds gathering at Damascus Gate in occupied East Al-Quds.
At least 19 people were injured as police used rubber-coated steel bullets, stun grenades, batons, and mounted forces to disperse crowds.
Footage shared online showed Zionist troops, including undercover officers, beating and wounding Palestinians as they arrested them.
It is customary for Zionist troops to exhibit increased levels of violence against Palestinians gathering in the area during the fasting month of Ramadan.
On Saturday, the regime’s police arrested four Palestinians during a night of tensions in the Old City of Al-Quds.
But regime troops resorted to more violent means of crackdown on Sunday, hurling stun grenades and gas canisters and severely beating worshipers returning from evening prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
Early in the day, dozens of illegal Zionist settlers escorted by regime troops stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque in the occupied Al-Quds. This happened as the Zionist police imposed movement restrictions on Muslim worshipers at the mosque’s entrances and gates on the second day of Ramadan.
Tensions are boiling across the occupied territories after Zionist troops shot dead three Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin on Saturday.
The Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad said the victims were its members, identifying them as Saeb Abhera, 30, Khalil Tawalbeh, 24, and Saif Abu Libdeh, 25.
The Palestinian resistance movement described the killings as an aggression against all Palestinians and an assault on the sanctity of the holy month of Ramadan. It vowed that the blood of the martyrs will not have been in vain.
Palestinian resistance groups based in the besieged Gaza Strip vowed a “harsh” response to any Zionist military escalation in the enclave or elsewhere across the occupied territories.
In a joint statement signed on Sunday, a number of Palestinian factions, including Hamas, which rules Gaza, and the Islamic Jihad movement, called for mobilizing all efforts “to boost the resistance against the occupying Israeli regime.”
“There will be no security or stability for the occupation until our people gain their freedom,” the statement said. “Any criminal act by the occupying regime will be met with a more powerful and harsher resistance.”
“Any policy of persecution, detention and assassination already proved failure and made our people more determined to continue their resistance,” the factions said following their meeting in Gaza.