GAZA CITY (Dispatches) – Palestine’s
Islamic Jihad movement has issued a stern warning it will go to war in support of its prisoners in the Zionist regime’s jails, while its military wing Al-Quds Brigades has announced a general mobilization.
Ziad Al-Nakhala, secretary-general of Islamic Jihad, said the movement would support the prisoners with everything it has, “even if it requires us to go to war for them, and no agreements or other considerations will prevent us from that.”
The Al-Quds Brigades responded to Al-Nakhala’s warning, with the announcement of a “general mobilization” and confirmation that it was “fully ready.”
In light of these developments, a meeting — whose venue was not specified — brought together a leading delegation headed by Al-Nakhala, and the other from Hamas, headed by Saleh Al-Arouri, deputy head of its political bureau.
The two sides stressed that the occupying regime’s abuse of Palestinian prisoners inside its prisons “leads the region toward a wide explosion,” according to a statement issued by Hamas.
The statement said the two movements warned “the enemy government against testing the patience and resistance of our people,” stressing that “harming the prisoners is an insult to all our people, and the occupation must bear the consequences of this foolish policy that may lead the region toward a wide explosion.”
Qaddoura Fares, head of the Palestinian Prisoners Club, said on Wednesday that 250 of Islamic Jihad’s detainees in the occupying regime’s prisons have started an open hunger strike to protest the “atrocious measures” against them, noting that “after seven days, 100 of them will also stop taking water.”
Of the approximately 5,000 Palestinians imprisoned in the regime’s prisons, about 400 are affiliated with Islamic Jihad.
According to the Prisoner’s Club, the striking prisoners are calling for “the prison administration to stop the abusive measures that it had imposed doubly against them after Sept. 6, the date of the Freedom Tunnel operation,” a reference to the escape of six prisoners — five of them from Islamic Jihad — through a tunnel from the regime’s Gilboa Prison.