GAZA (Dispatches) -- Leaders of the resistance movement Hamas swore defiance in a display of force on Wednesday as one of the most extremist regimes in the occupying regime of Israel’s history looks set to take office later this month.
Speaking before a sea of green flags in Gaza City’s Katiba gardens at a rally to mark Hamas’ 35th anniversary, the movement’s leader in Gaza, Yahya al-Sinwar said Palestinians faced an “open confrontation” with the Zionist regime.
He said the Al-Aqsa mosque complex in Al-Quds is threatened with encroachment by the “Talmudic, fascist, Zionist, rightist government” and said Hamas would respond with force.
“We will come to you with an endless number of rockets, we will come to you with an endless number of soldiers,” he said, accusing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition with extremist religious parties of seeking a “religious war”.
The rally, after a year that has seen some of the worst Israeli violence in the occupied West Bank in more than a decade and a brief conflict in Gaza, comes as Netanyahu prepares to take office at the head of a coalition uniting his Likud party with a clutch of extremist religious parties.
Tens of thousands of Hamas supporters filled the square, as solemn music boomed out over loudspeakers and black uniformed members of the movement’s armed wing marched through the crowd.
Born out of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in the late 1980s, Hamas assumed power in Gaza after defeating the rival Fatah movement in elections in 2006 and has maintained a steadfast resistance against the occupying regime of Israel.
Sinwar said the movement had been restrained by the need to rebuild after the 2021 war.
“Our silence is preparation and if we talk, it will be guns talking on our behalf,” he said.
Despite the Israeli violence in the West Bank that has claimed at least 165 Palestinian lives, Hamas has not intervened and it remained quiet in August when the Zionist regime’s warplanes bombarded sites connected with the Islamic Jihad movement in Gaza.
However its greatest challenge remains at home, where it is under increasing pressure to improve the quality of life for the 2.3 million Palestinians crammed into Gaza, under blockade for the past 15 years from both Israel and neighboring Egypt and facing an unemployment rate of 50%.
“We admire the resistance but as a ruler, Hamas needs to find a solution to our misery that doesn’t worsen it,” said Abu Ali, owner of a clothes shop in Gaza city.
Sinwar lauded Lions’ Den, a newly-formed resistance group in the occupied West Bank which has carried out a series of operations hailed by many Palestinians as acts of heroism in response to Israeli atrocities.
“They are not only in Nablus but all over the nation,” he said.
Sinwar urged members of Lions’ Den to “stand in line and get prepared to resist the Zionist fascism and apartheid.”
Touching on the issue of hundreds of Palestinian inmates in the Israeli jails, the Hamas leader warned the occupying regime that there is “a limited time to finish the prisoners’ swap deal, otherwise the issue of detainees will be closed forever and another way to liberate the Palestinian detainees will be found.”
Abu Khaled Muhammad al-Deif, chief of staff of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, also called for “unification of all factions for one goal and a great, noble and holy goal, which is the liberation of Palestine.”
Deif pledged that the Israeli regime and its supporters are “incapable of succeeding in what your fathers failed in, and it will be your end, the demise of your entity, and your sweeping away from our land.”
In a separate statement on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of its inception, Hamas called on the United Nations as well as the international community to do justice to the Palestinian people and their just cause.
The movement called for the Palestinian people’s right to end the Israeli occupation and establish their independent state with Al-Quds as its capital, as well as the right of return for refugees to be recognized.
It also called for an end to double standards adopted by the international community towards the occupied Palestine, including siding with the Tel Aviv regime against the legitimate rights of Palestinian people.