The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has slammed Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas for his faulting the Gaza Strip-based resistance groups’ retaliatory operation of the last year against the occupied territories.
The operation, dubbed Al-Aqsa Storm, was carried out on October 7. It came in response to remarkable escalation of the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of occupation and aggression against Palestinians.
Addressing an Arab League summit in the Bahraini capital Manama on Thursday, Abbas said the operation had been carried out following a “unilateral decision.” It “provided Israel with more pretexts and justifications to attack the Gaza Strip,” Abbas added, referring to a genocidal war that the regime has been waging against the coastal sliver since that date.
Hamas said it “regretted” the PA chief’s remarks, adding that “since 1948, the Zionist enemy has never waited for excuses to commit crimes against our people.”
The year bore witness to large-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and their mass exodus, courtesy of the apartheid Israeli regime and its Western backers.
More than 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed from their ancestral homes in Palestine and 500 villages and towns were destroyed by Zionist militias before the Israeli regime declared its illegal establishment on May 14 that year.
Ever since, the regime has waged several wholesale wars against the Gaza Strip, killing thousands of Palestinians during each one. It has also set up hundreds of illegal settlements across the occupied West Bank, imposing draconian restrictions on the Palestinians’ freedoms there, including their freedom of movement.