Israel has no one to blame but itself for the war with the Palestinians, says a lawmaker of the regime, insisting that the illegal occupation of the Palestinian land has caused the situation to escalate.
Ofer Cassif, a member of the Knesset and leftist Hadash coalition, told Al Jazeera on Sunday that his party had repeatedly warned the regime authorities that the way they treated the Palestinians would have serious repercussions.
“We have been warning time and time again… everything is going to erupt and everybody is going to pay a price… And unfortunately, that is exactly what happened,” said Cassif, whose party has four seats in the 120-member parliament.
The “fascist” regime, he said, “supports, encourages, and leads pogroms against the Palestinians.”
“There is an ethnic cleansing going on. It was obvious the writing was on the wall, written in the blood of the Palestinians.”
Some sources say more than 750 Israelis have been killed since early Saturday, when the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas launched massive rocket attacks and a ground operation from its bases in the Gaza Strip into the occupied territories.
Hamas says Operation al-Aqsa Storm is a response to Israel’s growing acts of aggression against the Palestinians, especially in the occupied West Bank, and its support for the recurrent presence of settlers in the al-Aqsa Mosque in the occupied Quds.
Scores of Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza, a besieged enclave on the Mediterranean, since the regime started to respond to Hamas attacks on Saturday.
