GAZA CITY (Dispatches) -- The Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad resistance movement, has unveiled a new indigenously- manufactured rocket named after a senior commander, who was assassinated in an Israeli airstrike on the besieged Gaza Strip two years ago.
The Baha Abu al-Ata was put on display during a ceremony attended by thousands of the group’s supporters here Friday evening.
Abu al-Ata and his wife were martyred in an Israeli airstrike targeting their home in the Gaza Strip on November 12, 2019.
The raid in Gaza’s Shejaiya neighborhood also wounded four of their children and a neighbor, triggering a spate of fighting between Israeli forces and Gaza-based Palestinian resistance fighters.
According to Islamic Jihad, Abu al-Ata was one of the most prominent members of its military wing, who played a major role in carrying out operations against the occupying regime of Israel.
Faced with a fathomless Israeli aggression, Palestinian resistance movements have stepped up their efforts to promote their military capabilities in recent years.
Last month, Hamas test-fired three new missiles from the besieged Gaza Strip.
In May, Palestinian resistance factions fired more than 4,000 rockets towards the occupied lands during an 11-day war.
Apparently caught off guard by unprecedented rocket barrages, Tel Aviv announced a unilateral ceasefire, which resistance groups accepted with Egyptian mediation.
An Israeli newspaper said at the time that Tel Aviv begged the U.S. to mediate a ceasefire after its military aggression on the besieged enclave prompted the Palestinian resistance to retaliate with a massive rocket barrage.
On Friday, a high-ranking Israeli general said the regime’s military forces will bypass some areas in the occupied territories while transporting ground forces to future war fronts.
Major-General Yitzhak Turgeman, chief of logistics for the occupying regime’s military, said the army had marked out 1,600 kilometers of dirt tracks, which could act as wartime alternatives to roads, and had set up new anti-riot units to protect convoys.
“I’m really concerned about... the impact of violent disturbances on internal security and movement of transport convoys,” Turgeman told the Hebrew-language Maariv daily newspaper in an interview.
The remarks came after video clips appeared on social media, showing army vehicles wending through Umm al-Fahm city, located 20 kilometers northwest of Jenin, during a drill.
The local municipality issued an open letter, condemning the presence of Israeli military forces in the area as “unacceptable and hurtful to residents’ feelings”.
Palestinians in the occupied territories are subject to daily aggression by the Israeli forces and the occupying regime’s mostly extremist settlers.
In the latest, Israeli military forces and extremist Jewish settlers have chopped down dozens of trees in the Palestinian town of Beit Ummar, some 11 kilometers northwest of Al-Khalil, in the southern part of the West Bank.
The Palestinian Information Center said Israeli forces and settlers uprooted more than 130 almond trees and bulldozed five dunams (5,000 square meters) of Palestinian-owned agricultural land in the town.
The destruction was carried out in order to facilitate expansion of the nearby illegal settlement of Karmei Tzur.
Dozens of extremist settlers also attacked Palestinians and activists near the settlement of Bat Ayin south of Al-Quds on Friday.
According to eyewitnesses, settlers began to attack Palestinians who had arrived in the area as part of the olive harvest.
More than 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Al-Quds.
The UN Security Council has condemned Israel’s settlement activities in the occupied territories in several resolutions. Palestinians want the West Bank as part of a future independent Palestinian state with East Al-Quds as its capital.