The meeting organizer, Research Center for Islamic Culture and Thought (RIICT), in cooperation with the Society for Defence of Palestinian Nation and Political Studies Association of Hawzah made the meeting a hybrid event in which people could participate in person (live) and virtually (online).
Referring to the war in Gaza, Nasser Abu Sharif the representative of Palestine’s Islamic Jihad Movement (PIJ) said in this meeting that before Al-Aqsa storm and before October 7, the Palestine case was being forgotten. Inside Palestine, in the West Bank, we witnessed the occupation of different areas and annexing them to Israel’s territory along with new settlements day by day, and the number of Palestinians being killed was going up. All the massacres in this area were aimed at driving Palestinians off their lands.
The best description for this situation is that a kind of apartheid system was applied against Palestine, and Palestinian National Authority was nothing more than the security guard for the Zionist regime. The Judaization project of Jerusalem was accelerated and Al-Aqsa Mosque was under the complete sovereignty of Israel. In fact they wanted to replace this holy place with Solomon’s Temple, he added.
The weakness arisen from the Palestinian issue and the efforts made to erase Palestine, left no way for Palestinian resistance except a revolutionary anger. This operation was a very big failure for the Zionist regime, something they themselves confessed. Also, it was a very big blow for US. This operation destroyed the Arab–Israeli normalization project, as well. In fact, one of the reasons behind the operation was to make the project a failure, he said.
It was an important outcome of the Al-Aqsa storm operation that the Palestinian issue regained its global importance and the message that Palestine case is not neglectable, and is spread worldwide was speread. Also, this operation proved that the Palestinian leadership is not in the hands of Mahmoud Abbas, but the Resistance and Hamas, and the Palestinians themselves confirmed this. The issue of leadership is very important and the Resistance should maintain its control, he expressed.
The representative of Palestine’s Islamic Jihad Movement said: Despite a lot of big actions we did before October 7th, we didn’t achieve a fruitful result and it was partly due to leadership performance. As you may know, a number of Arab countries are also working in the opposite direction. They not only seek to weaken the resistance, but also to destroy the resistance. The Zionist regime announcing the will to remove Hamas, revealed the plot publicly.
He went on to say that fortunately, after 65 days of war, the Zionist regime has failed to win the war, and that is why the regime is massacring Palestinians crazily in Gaza and continues to bombard people. However, in spite of this, Palestinian fighters are confronting Zionists and maintain war control.
Abu Sharif believed that, genocide and massacres committed by Zionist regime received negative feedbacks and unified the world against them. In fact, we have been successful in some dimensions including narrating the situation and political dimension of war.
He ended his speech saying “western governments and high officials suffered damages of war. They hold no hope for Israel regime; however, they are forced to support it.”
