GAZA STRIP (Anadolu) – Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, has inaugurated an arms exhibition for its homemade military equipment at Jabalia refugee camp, north of the Gaza Strip.
This exhibition, which was inaugurated by a number of Hamas and Al-Qassam leaders, marked Hamas’s 35th anniversary.
At the exhibition, Al-Qassam shows the stages of the development of its military equipment, such as S50 and M75 rockets and Shehab and Ababeel drones. All of them were used when the Palestinian resistance faced off against Zionist offensives in Gaza in 2014 and 2021.
Hamas official, Mohammad Abu Askar, expressed, “All that you see is produced by Al-Qassam fighters. It took years to reach this stage. Al-Qassam fighters paid souls and blood for it.”
Abu Askar, who spoke to Anadolu Agency, added, “The accumulation of power is part of the preparations for potential battles with the Israeli occupation, which has been in place in the Gaza Strip under a strict sea, air and ground siege for over 16 years.”
The official also noted, “The Palestinian resistance must be ready to defend the Palestinians everywhere in the event of harsh Israeli aggression on them and on their holy sites.”
Hamas was announced as an Islamic resistance movement on 14 December, 1987, just days after the eruption of the first Palestinian Intifada on 8 December, 1987, when a Zionist settler ran over a number of Palestinian workers east of Gaza, killing six of them.
Its main founder and spiritual leader was Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, a quadriplegic refugee. He spent more than two decades inside the Zionist regime’s jails.
Sheikh Yassin was assassinated in an operation supervised directly by former Zionist prime minister Ariel Sharon in March 2004.
The development comes as the Zionist regime has stepped up its attacks against Palestinians.
Hundreds of mourners participated in the funeral procession of a Palestinian teenager fatally shot by the Zionist regime’s forces in the town of Aboud, northwest of the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.
Palestinian media reports said the mourners marched through the streets of the nearby village of Beit Rima, northwest of Ramallah, on Friday as they carried the body of 16-year-old Dia Mohammad Rimawi, who had been killed by the regime’s gunfire on Thursday evening.
“The body was carried on the shoulders of the martyr’s family and friends,” the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported. “The air was filled with flags, cries of resistance against the occupation, and chants in honor of Palestine’s liberation.”