Thousands of Iraqis pour onto Tahrir Square in Baghdad in support of Palestinians amid Israeli air strikes on Gaza.
Palestine Resistance targets Safed, Galilee with new missile
Hamas announced the successful launch of Ayyash-250 Long-Range Rockets towards Northern Israel.
The Hamas military wing Qassam Brigades said in a statement on Friday that its forces launched Ayyash 250 rockets from the Gaza Strip at northern occupied lands (Israeli regime), which have a range of 250 kilometers.
The missile unit Qassam Brigades sain in a statement that in response to Israel’s crimes, they targeted the northern command headquarters army of the occupying in the city of Safad in northern occu[ied Palestine with an Aayash 250 missile.
To intercept the Ayyash 250 missile, in addition to the Iron Dome system, the American Patriot and David’s Sling air defense systems seems to have also been activated. It seems that the Iron Dome failed to intercept and destroy this missile due to its high altitude and high speed, so two other systems, Patriot and David’s Sling, were operated to prevent this missile from hitting the ground, which some sources say they were also also unsuccessful.
The following photos show an area in the city of Safed burning.
Palestinian resistance to tap ‘various capacities’ if Israel continues crimes: Iran FM
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has warned that the Palestinian resistance groups will tap into their various capacities if the Israeli regime presses ahead with savagery in its barbaric onslaught against the besieged Gaza Strip.
Amir-Abdollahian raised the alarm in a meeting with top Lebanese officials, including Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Secretary General of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in the capital Beirut on Friday during his second stop on a regional tour that has already taken him to Iraq.
In a meeting with Mikati, the Iranian foreign minister described Lebanon’s security and peace as important to the Islamic Republic and said one of the goals of his trip was to reaffirm the country’s security and its political process.
Pointing to the issue of Palestine and Israel’s ongoing onslaught on the besieged Gaza Strip, Amir-Abdollahian said the recent operation by the Palestinian resistance groups was a 100% Palestinian operation and even the Western governments acknowledged the matter.
The Israeli regime of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started its brutal aggression against Gaza on Saturday after resistance groups launched multi-pronged Operation al-Aqsa Storm, the largest military operation against the occupying entity in decades, leaving more than 1,300 settlers and troops dead and three times as many injured.
Since then, the resistance groups have fired thousands of rockets in retaliatory strikes at the occupied territories.
“This measure by the Palestinians was a natural reaction to Netanyahu’s crimes, especially in recent months,” Amir-Abdollahian told Mikati, adding, “Palestine after al-Aqsa Storm is different from Palestine before that.”
The top Iranian diplomat referred to Netanyahu’s extremism and his radical coalition cabinet as the reasons for the plight of Palestinians and the ongoing situation in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Amir-Abdollahian touched on the US’s unfaltering support for Israeli crimes against Palestinians and said the backing would exacerbate the situation and raise concerns about the opening of new fronts
“The US invites everyone to exercise restraint except Israel, which is unacceptable. They call on everyone to exercise restraint but they give weapons and aid to Israel and allow Netanyahu to freely continue his crimes,” he said.
“The US intends to give Israel time to destroy Gaza and this is the utter mistake of America, and if Americans want to prevent the war in the region from developing, they must contain Israel,” he added.
Warning against the continuation of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, Amir-Abdollahian said, “The Palestinian resistance is powerful and has high capabilities, and if Israel’s crimes continue, the Palestinian resistance will use its other capacities.”
The top Iranian diplomat also underlined the necessity of holding a high-level meeting between the representatives of Islamic countries with regard to Palestine.
Mikati, for his part, described the situation in Gaza as “saddening” and expressed Lebanon’s full support for Palestine and Palestinians.
The Lebanese premier said the bloodbath in Gaza should be stopped immediately, highlighting the necessity of exhausting all efforts to prevent a regional war.
In another meeting on Friday, Amir-Abdollahian and Nasrallah exchanged their views on the latest developments in the region, particularly the latest escalation by the Israeli regime on Gaza.
‘Everything is possible unless Israel stops war crimes’
In a joint press conference with his Lebanese counterpart Abdallah Bou Habib on Friday, the Iranian foreign minister censured the US administration’s duplicity in providing the Israeli regime with weapons and concomitantly calling for restraint.
“The Americans cannot send weapons and bombs to kill Palestinians on the one hand and ask all other parties to exercise restraint on the other,” Amir-Abdollahian said. “If the war crimes by the Zionist regime are not stopped, any possibility can open up.”
Bou Habib, for his part, denounced Israel for laying siege to two million people in Gaza and warned that the continuation of tensions would threaten the security of the region as well as international interests.
“We stand by the Palestinian people and call for an end to the siege of Gaza and condemn the crimes of the Zionist regime,” he underlined.
Stating that the world is witnessing a war crime against the residents of Gaza, the top Lebanese diplomat said, “We concurred that crimes against innocent people should be stopped and an urgent meeting should be convened at the level of Islamic countries.”
Backers of Israeli regime accomplice in its crimes: Raeisi
President Ebrahim Raeisi made the remarks on the second of his visit to Fars Province on Friday.
In an address to a gathering in Rostam County, he said that “After 75 years of witnessing repression and crimes, today the new generation of Palestinians are standing up against the Zionists, and this shows that neither crime and killing, nor deceitful deals have been able to discourage and dissuade the oppressed Palestinian people from pursuing their rights.”
He strongly condemned the Western support for the Israeli crimes.
“Countries that support the Zionist regime should know that they are accomplices in the regime’s crimes,” he said while addressing a gathering of people in Rostam County, Fars Province.
The “rightful demands and resistance” of Palestinian people will not end with such crimes, he said, adding that Palestinians “have had enough.”
“The issue of Palestine will not end by destroying Gaza; the people of Palestine and the world will hold you accountable because we consider defending Palestine as our duty,” he said while addressing Western supporters of the regime, especially the US, according to Press TV.
MNA
Ex-diplomat: Western media overlooking Palestinians’ right to self-defense
A former senior Palestinian diplomat says Western mainstream media are overlooking the Palestinian nation’s legitimate right to self-defense as the Israeli regime has been committing various forms of crimes against Palestinians for decades and is now heavily pounding the besieged Gaza Strip.
“The Western media’s behavior and double standards could only be best described as hypocrisy,” Ali Kazak told Press TV in an exclusive interview published on Friday.
He went on to sharply criticize the Western outlets’ extensive coverage of the war between Russia and Ukraine while exercising a new blackout on the Israeli regime’s daily crimes against the entire Palestinian nation.
“This is something we have been suffering from for the past 75 years,” he said.
Kazak also dismissed the Western media’s attempts to portray Operation al-Aqsa Storm as unprovoked, emphasizing that the occupying regime has long been perpetrating the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, committed tens of massacres against them, and has been pushing ahead with its apartheid policies.
The former Palestinian diplomat argued that the so-called Western advocates of human rights tend to brand those who launch retaliatory operations and are fighting against denial of their fundamental rights as terrorists.
“In the lexicon of the Western media that claim to be upholding human rights, some peoples are entitled to basic rights others are not.
“Israel has been slowly wiping out our people with the complicity of the United States, Britain and certain Western countries for the past 75 years. The United States has even refused to provide our people with international protection,” Kazak said.
He underscored that Palestinians have time and again tabled peace initiatives anchored in humanitarian values.
“Our first peace proposal was in 1968, when we put forward the establishment of a democratic secular state in Palestine, with Jews, Muslims and Christians all living under the protection of law. They refused that.
“Then in 1988, we proposed the [so-called] two-state solution. We made huge compromises to set up the Palestinian state, but Zionists once against turned down our proposal,” Kazak said.
He stated that Israeli authorities abused the so-called Oslo Peace Accords, signed in 1993, to deceive the international community as if they were going to recognize the Palestinian nation’s rights, but on the ground, they were building more and more illegal structures to accommodate extremist Jewish settlers.
“Palestinians are fed up with Western hypocrisy, double standards and Israeli war crimes against them. The US and Western countries have closed their eyes. They continue to support Israel financially, militarily and politically,” the former senior Palestinian diplomat added.
“We are not going to surrender. We are here to stay and achieve our full rights, our homeland and our right to self-determination,” he added.
Kazak concluded by saying that Israel has to fully recognize the Palestinian nation’s rights either through peaceful means or by means of endless wars.
South Africans empathize with Palestinians: al-Aqsa Storm
The Palestinian struggle for liberation is one that resonates with South Africans who faced a similar regime, with recent developments in the region highlighting how some have not abandoned their past racist ideals.
The developments in Palestine stir up a range of emotions in South Africans, religious, humanitarian, historical, and personal.
As a young person when I participated in the struggle against apartheid, I could immediately identify with the Hamas fighters breaking out … It was a moment of excitement, a moment in which I would have wanted to step out of the ghettos in which we were living.
And I could fully understand and appreciate the frustration under which the people of Gaza have been living and the fighters of Hamas have been operating.
Cassiem Kha, Anti-Apartheid Activist
But for others the ongoing Israeli atrocities over successive campaigns of terror, against the Gaza Strip in particular, have shown them the true face of Zionism.
The subjugation of the Palestinian people is nothing but racism. And therefore, irrespective of from which perspective we come, if we are serious about it, and if we have a shred of humanity, we must be opposed to racism.
Protestor 01
I desire to stand for humanity and justice. What is going on in Palestine today has no equivalent with anything else we have seen in this world.
Protestor 02
The whole world has looked away. That’s what they have resorted to. And now for me, I’ve said we need to continue to stand with them to show that they are not alone.
And they don’t need to listen to other media outlets where they say that they are the bad ones; that other people believe in their struggle and their cause.
Protestor 03
In fact, it is quite disappointing. It’s distasteful. It’s embarrassing that we still have South Africans that have experienced about it, and still support Israel.
Protestor 04
But it is that cohort of South Africans that protesters came to deliver the message to.
The Zionist center in Cape Town has been quiet, but, South African Zionists are actively involved in the Israeli aggression and routinely send over South African citizens to fight in the Israeli occupation force.
Protesters have demanded that the South African government take action against them.
As Palestinians continue to face the brutally racist Zionist regime, those who had just the mere taste of Zionism’s twin sister in South Africa, have vowed to keep up protests.
Millions of Muslims stage protests worldwide to decry Israeli atrocities against Palestinians
Millions of Muslims across the world held protests to condemn the Israeli regime’s atrocities against the people of Palestine as the Tel Aviv regime is pounding the Gaza Strip with thousands of bombs and imposing a complete siege on the area.
Protests have been held in Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan on Friday with more expected to unfold later in the day. They come as the Hamas resistance movement had called on people to stage rallies on Friday in support of Palestine.
In Iran, tens of thousands of people participated in the nationwide rallies, chanting slogans in support of Palestinians and in condemnation of the United States and the apartheid Tel Aviv regime.
The demonstrators also were carrying pro-Palestine banners. Some Iranian political figures also participated in the protests.
“The intricate, hybrid and heroic Operation al-Aqsa Storm dealt a fatal blow to the temporary and collapsing Zionist regime, which will be recorded in history,” Iran’s Islamic Propagation Organization said in a statement on Friday, noting that the operation marks an irreparable intelligence and military failure for the usurping Israeli regime and an epic victory of the resistance front.
“This surprise and strategic operation in the heart of the occupied territories significantly changed all equations on the ground in favor of Palestinian resistance groups and brave youths, and reaffirmed the strategic depth that liberation of the holy city of al-Quds has both at regional and international levels,” the statement read.
The Islamic Propagation Organization noted that the crushing operation by Palestinian resistance groups “dispelled the Israeli dream of expanding from the Nile to the Euphrates”, showed that “the Zionist regime is weaker than a spider’s web”, and debunked the “invincibility myth of the child-killing regime more than ever.”
“This pre-emptive and innovative operation clearly proved that the era of hit and run has ended, and the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa will be razed to ground by the sizeable Islamic resistance front in case Israel makes the slightest mistake,” the statement also read.
“Now that the Zionist enemy has suffered a disgraceful defeat from the Palestinian fighters on the battlefield and sees its prestige as well as military and security position destroyed, it targets the oppressed people of Gaza and insanely bombs mosques, schools and hospitals, and kills innocent civilians. The regime, relying on the help of the Great Satan (the US), is trying to restore its lost reputation.
Palestinian medical authorities say more than 1,500 people have been killed and many more injured due to Israeli bombardment across the Gaza Strip.
Hospital officials in the Strip have recorded the death of 1,572 civilians and injury of 7,262 others. A large number of buildings, homes and public facilities have also been badly damaged due to heavy Israeli bombardments.
Israeli diplomat attacked in Chinese capital
The Zionist Israeli regime’s foreign ministry issued a statement to journalists, saying the attack did not happen on the embassy’s grounds. The identity of the employee was not made public and no one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, according to Washington Post.
“The employee was transferred to hospital and he is in a stable condition,” the statement said, without giving additional details. It added that Israeli officials were still trying to assess the “background” of what happened in the assault.
It wasn’t immediately clear what sparked the attack, though it comes after Israel had criticized China for its statement that followed Hamas’ unprecedented attack on southern occupied territories controlled by the Zionist regime last Saturday in the Al-Aqsa Storm operation.
MNA
Pro-Palestine rallies in Iran kick off
The rallies in the Iranian capital in Tehran is held in downtown the city with the participation of a large number of Tehraners and the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Major General Hossein Salami as well as visiting Leader of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky.
This item is being updated…
FM Amir-Abdollahian meets different Lebanese leaders
The top Iranian diplomat Hossein Amir-Abdollahian arrived in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon as his second stop as part of a regional tour that has already taken him to Iraq.
He met with Lebanon’s Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati for talks on Friday morning.
Amir-Abdollahian further met and held talks with the Secretary General of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah also on Friday.
Moreover, the Iranian minister held a meeting with his Lebanese counterpart Abdullah Buhabib.
The regional tour by the Iranian foreign minister is taking place as the Zionist Israeli regime is conducting savage bombardment of Gaza Strip after the successful Hamas-launched Al-Aqsa Storm operation on Saturday. The regime’s ground invasion of the besieged enclave looms.
This item is being updated…
